


The Man Who Would Be Nyder

by mary_pseud



Series: Damnatio Memoriae [1]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Eugenics, M/M, Mad Scientists, Military, Serial: s078 Genesis of the Daleks, Skaro, Thal-Kaled War, Thousand Year War, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 09:18:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1463977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mary_pseud/pseuds/mary_pseud
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A boy born on Skaro, homeworld of the Daleks, would grow up to become Davros' feared second-in-command.  The story of Security Commander Nyder's youth, training, suffering and achievements.  AU (not audio-canon congruent).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Birth

  
He looked like any other newborn baby, red and wrinkled. He bawled at the touch of cold air, and again at the touch of gloved hands. The doctor in attendance clamped and cut the umbilicus, counted to make sure he had the correct number of toes and eyes and limbs, and then bitterly thought to himself that the kindest thing to do would be to dash the baby's brains out against the wall.

Instead, he handed the baby off to be cleaned and wrapped, and then turned to the unconscious body of the mother to monitor the expulsion of the afterbirth. Her heartbeat was strong: she'd survived the delivery, and could be taken back to the Kaled Infant Production Room, to let the drugs wear off. And then be drugged again, to prepare her for re-impregnation.

As was traditional, the baby boy would be nameless for three days: if he survived, the computer would choose a name for him. If the child was not physically perfect, it would not be fed or watered, which made it much more likely that it would not survive; then it or its body would be expelled from the Dome.

The baby survived to receive a name. There were thousands more names than there were baby boys to give them to, and tens of thousands of unused female names. If the baby had been female, that would have been special and notable - but another baby boy was routine.

After cross-checking the records of a thousand years' worth of war dead, the machine gave a name and number. Nyder 42018861.

After his naming, the next important thing that happened was his Testing. A silver metal cap was cupped over his bald head, and his infant body and brain were analysed. The machine tested DNA conformation, neuron potential, reflex speeds, and overall IQ: and it gave a surprising but welcome answer. Nyder was going to grow up to be a very intelligent man. Elite level, in fact; and his genes were pure. These facts were put onto his Birth record, along with his weight and name and number, and the record was properly filed. Nyder was moved into the Infant Elite Maintenance Room, given a full ration of liquid calories every day, and even touched on occasion.

Then disaster came. It came in the shape of a man, broad and ominous in Security Elite black. He went to the records room, and carefully looked for the records of six Elite boys: Eisel, Lett, Nyder, Marb, Borr, and Nettek. He substituted new paperwork for those six infants. The new papers were identical to the old, except instead of saying Elite, the babies' classifications were marked Standard.

Once that was done, the man in black had to physically move the six infants from the Elite room to one of the Standard rooms. He did this, and nobody lifted a hand to stop him. Nobody dared. One of the baby-tenders later muttered to a fellow worker that at least he hadn't taken the babies to the Bunker - and was shushed.

In the Standard room, Nyder and the other five babies cried and cried, their stomachs feeling real hunger for the first time in their lives. And instead of words and soft hands and a tube of warm wonderful food, they got a cold slap across their chests from a wet cloth.

They quickly learned not to cry. They would learn many things in the months and years to come. Even a Standard child had to learn some things.

* * *

He was taught to walk, and they immediately started teaching him to run. He learned to grasp: the first thing he ever held and picked up was a tiny replica of a gun.

They taught him speech. He learned to shout "Kill!" whenever he heard the word "Thal!" It wasn't his first word, but it was certainly one of the first. He learned to shout out his name and number on command:

"Nyder, 42018861!"

Nyder's world was the Children's Barracks, a world of black and white. White tile floors that he scrubbed a thousand times on hands and knees. Black bunks and black blankets and grey sheets that might have been white once - or black. The bunks were huge, twice as long as he was tall; adult-sized bunks. Metal boxes hanging from rods on the ceiling scanned constantly during the day: those were cameras, and the teachers could see through them somehow.

He grew up thin, all cheekbones and dark brows and bony wrists, and he grew up hungry. Not just for food: for answers. Always his mind watched and analysed and questioned everything around him. Why do we have to run all the time? Why isn't there enough clean water this week, and none of us can bathe? Who taught the teachers? Why are the Thals so bad, and why do we have to kill them?

His hunger for food was unfed; he got the same white food pills and chemical-tasting water as everyone else, but it was always barely enough to fill him. His hunger for knowledge got him only blows and humiliation when he dared to speak, to ask, to question. The teachers would make a game of it, mocking him in front of the other boys, giving false information mixed with true. And when he desperately tried to give the answer they wanted, they would snap, "If you're so clever, you can work it out for yourself." And then they would punish him, whether his answer was right or wrong, while the class jeered.

In time he learned to be silent, to swallow his questions, and to never let his feelings show. He sat obedient and quiet as the teachers explained about the war.

For a thousand years, the Kaleds and the Thals had been at war on the planet Skaro. The war had poisoned the earth and the water and the air; that's why the Kaleds lived in buildings sealed off by a great Dome. Without the Dome, the Thals would have slaughtered them all. But this generation of Kaleds would become soldiers so strong, so merciless and so skilled that they would destroy the Thals forever, once and for all, and win the war!

Nyder cheered when the teachers paused there, just like the other boys cheered. But inside, a part of his mind asked if the teacher hadn't repeated this before, many times. He had no real idea of how old the teachers were. He had never seen anything but children, and men with tired eyes and lines on their faces like across the palm of a hand. Were the teachers forty years old? A hundred? Who knew? Nyder wasn't even quite sure of how long a year was.

They taught him words, but not letters: any attempt to sound out the different squiggles that were a part of the Approved Words would earn him a cuff on the back of the head or worse. He spent an entire class session kneeling motionless with pens under his knees, the sharp plastic ridges grinding into his skin, for daring to try to write his own name before that lesson was on the schedule. The schedule was everything.

They taught him math, how to count to fifty and a hundred, but any numbers above that were sketchily described if at all. Nyder had to work out for himself how to count higher. He made up his own words for the greater numbers: ten-hundreds, ten-ten-hundreds. And he found himself completely fascinated by numbers that could not be divided by other numbers. Special numbers, numbers that stood alone and refused to be split.

Sometimes he would count the special numbers out to himself in his head, while enduring some endurance training session: two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, and on and on, as far as his mind could handle them. He once got as high as three hundred and eleven before a well-placed slap interrupted him.

He memorised endless orders, commands, rules, hand signals, radio signals, smoke signals, and listened to the sounds of a thousand explosions to be able to identify them: microwave cannon, muzzleloader, grenade, plasma grenade, plague grenade, land mine, leaping land mine, water detonation, mortar round, airbursts.

The children fought as part of their lessons. Sometimes it was in on the training floor, and the teachers would set one boy to fight another, or two others, or five, and stand there shouting and criticising until all the boys collapsed of exhaustion or injuries. Nyder learned how to fight when he was dizzy from lack of sleep, when he was parched with thirst, when he had broken ribs from a vicious kick to the side when he was down (the boy who delivered that kick got extra rations that night), when he was blindfolded, when he was woken from sound sleep.

Sometimes the children fought when there were no teachers. They fought over food, or bunk space, or insults and slights and misinterpreted glances: fought silent and fast, throwing each other down between the bunks in the sleeping areas. They had figured out that the cameras only started to move and to watch when someone stood up: so entire battles and wars were fought under the bunks, on the boys' knees.

Nyder fought, perhaps somewhat more than the others. He was a small boy, and small meant weakness, small meant being constantly pressured to give up things that Nyder wasn't strong enough to defend: his food, his blankets. So he fought, and he often lost. But he kept fighting.

No matter what, in any situation, he had to keep fighting. That was all.

* * *

There were guards at the Children's Barracks, great looming men cradling real guns that any of the boys would have given three meals to be able to touch. One day, a guard came for Nyder, and took him into a small room. In the room there was a plump man, not a teacher, someone Nyder had never seen before.

"Here's one, Administrator Nenno," the guard said.

"Thank you, you may go," said Nenno, gesturing as though brushing the guard away. He leaned forward in his chair, staring at Nyder.

Nyder stared back; he was used to being afraid of the teachers and the guards, but with this stranger he didn't know what to do. The man was wearing long white robes instead of the Teacher's blue coveralls; they swung a little when he stood up and stepped closer to Nyder. His arms were actually fat, and the skin under his chin bulged out when he tilted his face down and smiled.

"My, what a beautiful boy," he said.

"Really?" Nyder responded, and his eyebrows rose. Nobody had ever called him beautiful before. His eyes wandered openly over the man in front of him, too naïve to be afraid, and he completely misinterpreted the wider smile that this look called forth.

"Really," said Nenno, kicking Nyder as hard as he could between the legs. His fat hand clamped down on the boy's scream, and he began.

When the man was done, he knocked at the door and the guard opened it. Nyder watched, helpless on the floor, as a little glass bottle was handed to the guard.

"Clean him up," Nenno said to the guard, and then he turned back to the naked boy cringing on the floor, whose hands vainly tried to shield all his body from those terrible, merciless eyes surrounded by pink flushed skin.

"I'll be back," Nenno promised, and he was.

* * *

The training went on, and the fights, and the lessons. And the other thing. Nenno came at irregular intervals, so there was no telling when Nyder would feel the guard's hand on his shoulder that meant he had to go.

Nyder tried to think of something he could do, but there was nothing. He had never thought that there something wrong with children being struck by adults: after all, the teachers hit him all the time. Somehow though, what Nenno did was much worse. He thought of getting a weapon somehow, of fighting back: imagined pumping the man's fat rippling flesh full of bullets, or ramming a great sword right through him. But he had only play weapons, not real ones.

He couldn't ask anyone for help. He was all alone. And no matter what he did to try and make it easier, Nenno made it worse. He taught Nyder to do things that he didn't want to do, and no matter how hard he tried to do it right, Nenno always insisted that it was wrong, all wrong, too wet, too tight, not enough, filthy worthless rag of a boy, filthy, filthy! And then he hurt Nyder all the worse.

Nenno found that his preferred victim was a fastidious boy: it amused him to dirty him, rub his face in his own waste, soil him completely. Nyder was too humiliated to go to the doctor, so he would wash his body and his tainted wounds with the chemical mouthwash that sat in a big bottle in the washroom, and bandage himself with a spare shirt. The bite marks and scratches were deep and red and they hurt, across his shoulders, under his arms, between his legs.

The other children saw the marks of course, in the showers. They taught him the name 'boy-hunter', and told him that if he wasn't the target, one of them would be. Better him than them. They even suggested that he deserved to be hunted, somehow. If any of the teachers saw the marks, saw the way that Nyder would sit or slump or hold his arms out, trying to keep raw flesh from hurting more, they ignored it.

But the day came when Nenno stripped the shuddering boy before him- and frowned, rather than leered. He stared at the faint shadow of hair just starting to sprout across Nyder's upper lip and chest, at the slight broadening of his shoulders.

"Filthy," he hissed. "Filthy, hairy animal!" Then there were no more words; there was only punishment, screams of rage, blows and kicks. And teeth, tearing teeth, meeting in the boy's flesh, tearing and pulling away.

That wound could not be tended by Nyder; it wouldn't stop bleeding, no matter how hard he pressed on it. He did go to the doctor at last, but when he was asked "Who did this?" the muscles knotted in his jaw, and he went silent. Nenno had held him down with suffocating force and told him, blood dripping from his lips into his victim's face, exactly what he would do if Nyder told anyone.

The doctor looked at the bruised boy in front of him with emotionless eyes, and then went back to packing the wound where a nipple had been. The marks were too large to be from another child; and if it was an adult, then it was better not to get involved. He used scar minimising solution on the fresh wound; it was too late to use it on the other marks. Nyder would carry those curved bite scars on his shoulders and underarms for the rest of his life, barring some miracle of medicine.

And the next day, they took a blood sample from Nyder's arm, read the hormone results, and took him away from everything he had ever known.

 

  


   


  



	2. Birth

  
Nyder arrived in the Trainee's Barracks with the clothes on his back and nothing more. He was issued a ration card (he immediately hid it under his clothes, against his skin - he had learned) and a schedule of lessons. The other boys looked at him with angry eyes as he entered the room, and he was shoved to the least desirable bunk. Nobody talked to him; nobody even told him their name. They treated him like an enemy, for no reason that he could see.

That night, two of the older boys came and stood over his bunk, where he lay with his back to the wall through long habit. The bright marks of bruises were still prominent on his skin, but they didn't seem to care.

"Get up," one of them ordered. "Let's see what you've got for us."

Nyder got up, slowly, and then peeled out of his newly issued pyjamas with dispatch. He had thought that seeing his body, the shadow of hair in his armpits and groin, would repulse them as it had repulsed Nenno. But it didn't work that way.

"All right then!" one of them gloated, pinning Nyder to his cot and straddling his face, thrusting himself forward. "You know what to do, now do it!" And when Nyder did, the other boy assaulted him in turn.

The teachers had taught him nothing about how to relate to his fellow Kaleds, except in the context of the military. He had no idea of how to respond to any sort of social interaction: he only knew to take orders from those above him. Here he was the youngest and the smallest: here, everyone was above him.

The war lessons were the same as before, just more elaborate, more intricate. But Nyder learned them all very quickly, and hid his learning, sitting there blank-faced and attentive as the teachers drummed the same lessons again and again and again into the other boys.

They taught weapons improvisation, terrain evaluation, and emergency medical self-treatment. They taught war. They did not teach about war: they taught the children to be war.

At night, the bigger boys used Nyder. He always fought back, but he wasn't their match. They would use him again and again, not let him sleep. And he couldn't afford to lose sleep, because if he was tired he might make mistakes. He might fail. Failure meant not just starvation and beatings, but possible culling: all of them knew what happened to students who failed the training, or who went mad. There were no more crops on Skaro: bodies went to the food processing plants, so that life and the war could go on.

When the boys' rough abuse drew responses from his own body, Nyder felt betrayed by himself twice over. He had thought once that nothing could be worse than being dead, than not being. In his despair and endless exhaustion, he was starting to think differently. Sometimes he wondered if being culled might not be easier, all things considered.

There was only one teacher that made him feel anything but indifference and fear and frustration, and that was Combat Instructor Erem. Erem was huge, and his face was a mask of scars. But his calloused hands were wonderfully quick, adjusting a student's stance, catching one who was about to fall from the overhead crawl bars. And unlike most of the other instructors, he never struck his students without reason. He taught carefully, and for once it wasn't just lessons that were absorbed in a single session: it was learning how body and reflexes and mind all could be controlled, and all could work together. And he praised Nyder for his swift and skilful hands, which nobody else did.

It was under Erem that Nyder learned real weapons. Not the play guns and plastic grenades he had used before: these were sharp gleaming knives and real guns heavy in his hands. He only fired blanks, because bullets were too precious to waste, but he could already see in his mind's eye the bloody holes his weapons would tear in the Thals.

The Thals: he'd seen them now, in newsreels and training footage. Horrible pale-haired monsters, with flat blue eyes, and some of them were female. That was a part of their perversion, their decadence: that they would send their women out onto the battlefield to fight, rather than honouring them and keeping them in safety, as the civilised Kaleds did. Nyder knew that women and babies were somehow connected; he vaguely thought that babies grew out of something women ate. Like a special food pill.

He had seen the leaders of his people in those newsreels, grave-faced men in long white robes. And he had seen the Supreme Commander, Davros. The greatest scientist in the world, who had defeated even death to lead his people to victory. His body might be blind and scarred and shrivelled, kept alive only by machines, but his words were like bolts of lightning to the heart.

Nyder dreamed war; dreamed of fighting and killing, honours, medals, a great Victory Parade after the Thals had been exterminated. And sometimes he dreamed of a gun that never ran out of bullets, which he used to kill the entire world. Sometimes when he dreamed that, he touched himself, pleased himself as best he could. Nobody else was ever going to touch him to please, after all.

* * *

Today Erem had issued javelins, and his class was handling them, getting the heft and testing the roughness of the shafts against their hands. Pikk was one of the boys who most delighted in tormenting Nyder, and when Erem was looking the other way, Pikk slammed his hand atop the butt of Nyder's javelin, driving the point downward and into Nyder's foot right through the boot.

Nyder did not cry out; instead he said in a clotted voice, "Man down!" Erem was beside him in an instant, removing the javelin with a single straight-up tug. He pulled a cutting tool from his belt with his free hand and sliced Nyder's boot and sock from top to toe.

"Between the bones. Nyder, you've got one minute to clean and wrap this. Go!" Without a word of protest, Nyder hopped to his medical kit (they carried full kit everywhere now, as heavy as a real soldier's or heavier), bared his foot, and started to smear antibiotic around the edges of the puncture. He was concentrating on getting the bandage tight enough, and didn't look up until the sound of the third whistling blow. Then he did, and his mouth hung open even while his hands adjusted the bandage.

Erem was beating Pikk; he had the boy bent over by the hair, and was thrashing him across the shoulders with the flexible shaft of the javelin, hard enough that a little spray of dust and sweat rose from Pikk's clothes with every blow. The other boys stood open-mouthed as well. Aggression towards other students had always been rewarded in their training, not punished.

"You - are - never -to - strike - a - trainee - unless - I - order - it!" Erem shouted; each word was punctuated with a blow. Then he pulled Pikk upright by the hair, face to face, and stared at him; the scars around his eyes pulled the skin in odd directions as he squinted. "This isn't a game, Trainee, this is war! If you play games with real weapons, you die!"

"But he dropped it!" Pikk wailed. Erem's response was to bend him over again, and thrash him hard across the arse; each blow was louder than a pistol blank, louder than Pikk's sobs. When Erem stood him up again, the boy's face was red-purple with pain and tears.

"I'm finished, sir," said Nyder, quickly stepping back into line. He wiggled his toes in the boot; they all moved, but the wetness was already starting to seep out. Well, the boot was ruined anyway. He kept his face blank, not allowing his delight in Pikk's beating to show.

"Good. Trainee Pikk, never lie to me. Ever. Those javelins are too light for droppin' to go through a boot. And I saw that hit. Press-ups to fallin', all of you!" The boys groaned inside; that meant exercise until you collapsed. "Nyder, inspection."

Nyder walked carefully back to the bench beside the wall, and watched Erem's marvellously quick fingers tenderly remove the boot and test the binding of his wound. "Good," the teacher finally said. "No tendon damage. I'll give you a pass for the doctor when class ends. The lacin' will hold that boot until Stores issues a new one. Back to class for you, then."

"Yes, sir," Nyder said crisply, replacing and adjusting the boot. Then he licked his lips nervously, and silently mouthed, Thank you.

Erem didn't say anything, but his eyelid shivered in what was not quite a wink. "Right!" he roared, standing and turning to the panting students. "Now you are goin' to learn how to throw these javelins, smoothly an' with accuracy - and no games or I flog you 'til your so-called brains run out your nose!"

When Pikk stalked to Nyder's bunk that night, rage in his face and in his fists, Nyder was ready. The boys were always searched for weapons when they went into their sleeping quarters, but Nyder had managed to wheedle the doctor into issuing him a hard plastic cast, rather than just a bandage.

Pikk snarled, "I'm going to shove my whole fist-" and Nyder rolled to his feet and kicked, hard and accurately, just as he had been kicked in the past. The cast did not break, but it bent, and Nyder felt agonising pain in his foot. He didn't care; it was worth it to see Pikk fall, white-faced, hands clutching in-between his legs. Nyder kicked him again, twice, driving him across the floor with each blow.

The entire bunk room was silent and staring as Nyder bent his head and said to Pikk, in a voice all the more frightening for being totally mild and unemotional, "Touch me again and you'll be sorry." That was all he said. That was all he needed to say.

Pikk tried to stand, but he couldn't; instead he crawled back to his own bunk. The bruising on his shoulders and arse and ribs was agony, and the shooting pain in his hip was worse, even worse than the gnawing pains in all his joints: he lay on his side, staring at Nyder's dark head against the pillow, planning for the day when he would crush him like a broken food pill.

In the morning, Pikk didn't wake up. The boys were sent to stand in the hallway; a few dared to lurk by the door and try to listen, but only Nyder knew where to lean near the ventilation duct and hear everything that was said.

"-beating?" was the first thing he heard, and he tensed. Was Erem going to be blamed for this?

"No," said the voice of the doctor. "Brittle bone disease. His hip's broken; probably a clot or a bit of marrow got into his circulatory system."

"Brittle bone - it should have manifested by now!"

"These genetic diseases vary. So, mark him down as culled for genetic defect. That way, there's no mark against us."

"Clever, Mnuu."

"Dirty." Doctor Mnuu made a noise like spitting. "And maybe he fell and broke his hip, or maybe someone helped him along, but according to this scan he'd have washed out within the month anyway." Another spitting noise. "The pain must have been excruciating, why didn't he tell anyone?"

"Too busy taking it out on the other boys," the teacher suggested, and then sent for a body bag.

The lessons went on. The rougher boys turned their attention to other victims. Nyder was no longer the smallest or the weakest; he watched the other boys be taken, the new boys, with absolutely no interest in coming to their defence. Now that he was known as the boy who had killed, he had a certain amount of chilly prestige, which he did not hesitate to use.

He grew sinister, in a fashion quite ludicrous for a boy barely a man: but there was nobody to call him a fool. He stopped talking unless spoken to, and cultivated a level-eyed stare that concentrated on body language and gestures rather than words. He found it fascinating how easy it was to read intent in people, perceive what they were really going to do, once you ignored what they were saying with their mouths.

Some of the teachers might have noticed how he had withdrawn, but they ignored it, just as they ignored the students who compulsively counted their food pills, or pulled out their hair in red clots, or paced back and forth every night until they collapsed into their bunks. It was their job to deliver these boys to the battlefield; it was not their job to keep them perfectly sane. If a boy became too unbalanced to train, he was handed over to the psych techs: what came back was generally sniper bait at best.

* * *

Assignment Day was coming. War was coming. Nyder was going out to war, to embrace it and bathe in it, to become one with it. And to die.

He could see war in the shape of his body, lean but with muscles standing out across shoulders and chest, thick calves and calloused feet and hands. A soldier's body. He could field-strip a rifle blindfolded, march and run and crawl and roll, kill a man with his hands or his knife or his mess kit. Behind his face, still barely shadowed with beard, was a soldier's mind, filled with knowledge of weapons and orders. He'd had his last medical exam and been fitted for a real uniform, and that meant he was going out within the next few weeks.

There was frequent debate among the boys as to when it would be worse to be outside: in the summer or winter? Nyder secretly hoped it would be winter: he preferred cold. He didn't know about the seasons, of course, except in books. His battlefield assignment would be the first time he had ever seen the outside world.

Behind his blank face, Nyder was afraid. He was so afraid that it felt like there was a hole in his chest, and nothing inside it but fear: no heart, no lungs, no nothing. He was nothing but a solid mass of fear, with tiny arms and legs, frail now in his mind's eye, tiny insect legs, somehow dragging the giant fear along.

There was so much he'd never learned! It was like he was in some great dark room filled with treasures, and he could only touch a few things, in the dark, and never see everything he was missing. It drove him mad, that he was going to die with his mind so empty.

But there was one thing he was going to do before he went. He'd watched the teachers, carefully and closely, as they worked the pushbutton locks that sealed every door. Counted how many times they used each combination, and on which days. Listened to them talk about the work they did outside the classrooms. He'd managed to get lost on several strategic occasions, and accepted the floggings mutely, remembering the rooms outside, and the barely-understandable lettering on them.

* * *

That night-cycle, he escaped.

Nyder knew that the passcode to the main doors was 40309. And that the passcode to the office section was 90304. The cameras here were like the ones in the Children's Barracks; they only registered movement above waist level, so he crawled, fast and determined in his worn and too-small grey pyjamas, with a single precious piece of stolen paper tucked under his shirt.

Outside the office with Erem's name by the door, he paused. He carefully folded the paper into a low box shape, and leaping as though hurling a grenade out of a trench (a leap he had practiced many times), he got the paper in place, covering the black part on top of the camera, but not the lens.

He paused a long moment, and then waved his hand over his head for an instant, ready to dive for the floor and scuttle away if he had to. The camera's light stayed off. He looked at Erem's door, and shuddered. This was his last chance.

When he touched the door control, it opened and he darted inside.

Inside, Erem sat at a desk in front of a box that cast a faint green glow onto the side of his face. He looked up with his usual unreadable expression and spat, "How the shit did you get in here, boy?"

Nyder swallowed, and quickly spilled out what he knew about the passcodes and the cameras. He tried to relax, to talk evenly, but it all blurted out. He looked at Erem, his breath seeming to be frozen in his lungs, certain that everything he was feeling was showing in his face for once. And not caring.

Erem choked, and then abruptly roared with laughter; Nyder started breathing again. "You are too smart for your own good," he said, and then all the laughter drained out of his voice. "Damn smart, and you shouldn't be."

Nyder dared to move a little closer to the seated man, and saw that there were flickering green characters on the glass-fronted box. That had to be a- "Is that a computer?" he said, his voice turning up with excitement.

"That? No, it just talks to one. Nyder…you shouldn't be here, it's strictly against regulations. If they flog you now, you'll still be limpin' when you go outside on your assignment, it'll slow you down and you can't afford that!" Erem leaned forward, eyes blazing. "Nyder, you've got to go."

Nyder licked his lips. "I came to say goodbye to you. Because," his voice hitched, and then he went on flatly, "because I'm going to die, most likely, and I wanted you to know that you're the only person who's ever been kind to me, ever. And I'm sorry that I'm going to die. But there's nothing else I can do."

Erem pushed back from his desk and just stared at Nyder. Then he sighed deeply, and gestured for him to come closer.

"Nyder," he said, putting one hand on the boy's shoulder. "I meant it when I said you're damn smart. You're smart enough for Elite, and I've looked at your record, and I can't see why you aren't Elite."

Nyder felt a little spark of something he barely identified as hope in his chest. The Elite: they stayed in the Dome, they didn't have to fight outside, they got all the food they wanted. If he could be one of them…he was good with tests, very good!

"But the machine don't make mistakes, Nyder. It can't make mistakes, and even if it did, I don't think there's anyone alive who can fix it." Erem reached out with his other hand, and touched the banks of little buttons with letters on them, set into his desk. "You can't edit the Testing records. There's no way to change that, or if there is, I don't have the power to do it."

Nyder felt that spark die out, leaving only a little black hole in him. His face quivered, and without knowing quite why he buried his face in Erem's shoulder, and cried. He cried out loud, as he had never cried in front of anyone before. He barely noticed as Erem put his arms around him, helped him sit down on what must be Erem's lap. All he felt was pain inside, pain and fear, and only gradually did he realise that Erem was still there, holding him, trying to talk to him.

He finally snuffled hugely, and looked up, into Erem's face: and saw tears there too.

"Nyder," Erem said, putting one huge hand on the boy's face and wiping away a tear with his thumb, "you're too good for this war. All of you are, even little backstabbin' shits like Pikk. None of you should have to fight."

"That's-" and Nyder choked on the obscenity.

"Pacifist talk?" Nyder's eyes went huge at the sound of the forbidden word. Erem didn't seem to notice; instead he went on. "Maybe it is. But right now us and the Thals are fightin' like two rats on a floatin' log, never noticin' that it's about to float right over a waterfall. We need to end this war, or we will all die."

Then he pointed a finger at Nyder's face, a finger that looked as huge as a cannon from Nyder's point of view. His scarred face seemed cold, although his eyes were still warm. "So here's three things you're goin' to do for me. And maybe someday you'll come back to the Dome, for good. I did it, and I'm not near as smart as you. So here's what you're goin' to do.

"First, you are goin' to live. Live because you're not an animal, because you're too good to die out there like an animal. Can you do that for me?"

Nyder was shaking with tension, and Erem must have felt it, because he stopped pointing in that threatening way and put both arms back around him. Nyder pressed his mouth close to Erem's ear and held his voice as steady as he could as he whispered, "I'll live."

"Yes, you will." Erem rocked him back and forth in his embrace for a long moment. "And the second thing is, be happy."

"Be happy?" Nyder leaned back and looked at Erem. "How?"

"Any damn way you can, Nyder. Be happy that you're alive, be happy to eat, be happy to see a patch of blue sky. Grab happiness with both hands and keep it, because it's your happiness, always. Nobody can take it from you. It's all yours."

Erem's eyes grew sad now. "And the last thing is the hardest." He put his hand on top of Nyder's head; it was so big that it practically covered it. "Try to be kind. When your fellow Kaled is starvin', share. When the next raw recruit comes out into the Wastelands all scared and weepin', give him a helping hand. Be kind to those who deserve it, and the back of your hand to those who don't. Someone was kind to me once, and I've tried to be kind, so you follow on after me, boy.

"And be kind to yourself, always. Because if you can't be kind, you might as well be an animal, fightin' and dyin' without even knowing what you are. I know it's harder than anything else: harder than being happy, harder even than living sometimes. Try to be kind."

Nyder snuffled again, and finally said faintly that he should get back to his bunk. Erem let him get up and go to the door, and then in all a rush Nyder came back and kissed him, like he'd seen the big boys kiss sometimes. It was fast and clumsy and wet and their noses were all squashed, and then he slipped out the door.

Nyder jumped to retrieve his bit of paper from atop the camera. He took it back with him to his bunk, intending to bring it out onto the battlefield as the only thing he had to remember Erem by. But in the rush of the morning's preparation, he forgot it, folded up small and tiny under his pillow. The next boy assigned to the bunk threw it away.


	3. The Wastelands

  
Private Nyder's feet hurt.

He was in uniform, carrying full kit and real weapons. He'd been turned out of the Dome without ceremony and given a geographic location for his new section, a map, and a compass; but scarcely any water. And the two streams he'd passed had been dry; not that it would be entirely safe to drink free water, even if he used the chemical purification kit. His feet hurt, and his shoulders, and he felt like he was all alone in the world. All alone, with no comforting roof over him, just the vast empty unknown brightness of the sky. All alone for the first time in his life.

The world was dirty: it was mud that had been pounded flat a thousand times, great heaps of stone to be crawled around or over, buzzing flies that stung his ears and eyes, and the dead. The only Kaleds he saw were dead, lying twisted in the mud as though crumpled and tossed by a giant. The smell of them was hideous, unmistakable: he thought that he would never be able to un-smell it.

He finally found his section, and gave the correct password to the sentry. When he stumbled down into the trench and reported to his commanding officer, Sergeant Ralt, he shivered inside as the other men gathered, staring at him. They were all taller than him, of course: all bigger and stronger. He was the littlest, again.

"All right," said one of the most battered ones, stepping forward and reaching out. "Let's see what you've got for us."

Those words were nearly his last; Nyder's kick to the throat was off-centre, though, and he didn't succeed in crushing the man's windpipe. The other soldiers dove for their weapons. Nyder lunged backwards, white-eyed, bringing his rifle up-

"STOP!" shouted his officer, and he stopped.

Sergeant Ralt was both brave and used to handling new recruits; he stepped forward and explained to the trembling boy that they were low on supplies and gear. What Nyder brought with him, fresh from the Dome, would have to be distributed between all the men, to maximise everyone's chances for survival.

Nyder looked at Ralt with empty eyes, paying more attention to his body language than his words. But finally he surrendered his kit. His fine new weapons were handed over to the oldest soldiers, and he got the most battered rifle in exchange. He lost his toothbrush, his helmet and his fork; he'd have to eat with his spoon.

In some faint feeling of gratitude for the new helmet, one of Nyder's fellow soldiers advised him in a dead-tired voice, "Keep your head down. Keep your feet dry. And try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo."

That night, he bundled up in his sleepbag, waiting for some of the others to come and try to touch him: but none of them did. They ignored him. He was cold and alone and thirsty, and the ground was hard, and the night was dark and probably full of monsters, Thals and Mutos and worse. And his rifle was right there, within reach. How easy it would be to pull it into the bag with him, snug the barrel under his chin, and-

He swallowed, hard, and stared upwards. And his mouth fell open.

There were stars. Tiny lights burning in the sky, scattered like…like…he didn't know what they were like. Like nothing he'd ever seen before. At first he thought they were all the same colour; then he started to see differences, reds and greens and yellows. And hanging in-between the multicoloured points of light were two great glowing shapes which must be the moons.

It was beautiful. The sky was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. He stared up at it, and forgot about his rifle, and the cold ground, and the loneliness for a little time. Long enough for him to fall asleep.

* * *

The unit ignored him the next day, and the next. They spoke to him as little as possible, put him on the point position, set him to scouting. Nyder accepted this. And it rather made sense: he was the newest, he was the most likely to die, so he should take the most dangerous position. He did not complain, even though he was hungrier than he ever remembered, and more exhausted, and so filthy he thought he would never be clean. He scouted wide-eyed, and wondered when death was going to come for him. And whether it would hurt.

He tried to be happy. He stared at the daytime sky, and found it uninteresting. The landscape actually repelled. The food pills were stale-tasting, the water was cloudy and stank, his uniform chafed. He concentrated, and told himself: while I am alive, there is the chance to be happy, the chance to be kind, and the chance to get out of here - somehow.

His first kill happened almost by accident. He stepped around a rock and found a man standing there in the wrong uniform. He didn't have time to see if the man was pissing or napping or watching; he just fired. The Thal fired as well, but reflex aimed his shot high, and it whistled over Nyder's shoulder while his own bullet went into the man's guts. The Thal thrashed on the ground for a moment, then shivered and was still, mud soaking into his blond hair and open eyes.

Nyder crouched and looked in all directions before calling in a low voice "Clear!" and going to examine the man's weapon. Unfortunately it was incompatible with the ammunition he had, and the Thal didn't have any reloads, so he put it aside. He did find a new toothbrush in the man's pocket: it was even Kaled issue. The thin plastic wrapping seemed intact, but what if the Thals had somehow tampered with it? He was pondering this when the rest of the squad came up.

"Your first, Private?" asked Ralt, not casually.

"Yes, sir. This toothbrush all right to take? It's still sealed."

"What? Yes, of course. Your kill, your loot." Ralt watched with faintly dismayed eyes as Nyder rifled the corpse, pocketing some things and handing the rest to the other men. This sort of callousness was what you expected in someone who'd been on the battlefield months, not days.

They fell back into march, with Nyder on point. Nothing seemed to have changed, and if some of the other men looked at the slim shape in front of them with new respect, Nyder did not notice, or particularly care.

That night, he woke up to see four of the soldiers looming over him with a hooded lantern. His throat tensed. What did they want from him now?

One of them whispered, "I brought the blood."

"What?" Nyder asked, his voice barely louder than the wind.

"The blood of your first kill. Here, sit up." Nyder did, and felt them rub a wet cloth on his cheeks, leaving behind cool stickiness. The one who had marked him reached under his own collar and fished out a pendant of some sort: when he cracked the lantern Nyder saw two arcs of twisted metal, joined together at the bottom.

"This is the sign. The God of War, the Horned God. He who gores the world. He makes war, and makes men powerful through it. Now that you've made your first kill, He can see you. If you pray to Him, an' He chooses you, you'll be His avatar. You'll lead all the people to destroy the Thals, forever."

That sounded all right by Nyder, so he willingly said the chant with them, accepted as they scrawled the sign of the horns on his forehead with the Thal blood. One of them used an entrenching tool to scrape a single notch into the pommel of Nyder's service dagger. But afterwards, he felt no different. They had no pendant for him; he would have to make his own. And none of the men offered to stay; they went back to their own sleepbags and their own partners.

The blood flaked on his face, and he ended up rubbing most of it off on the edge of his sleepbag before he went to sleep. The faint red stain of it remained on the cloth for a long time, the mark and the smell of his first kill.

* * *

Eventually another new recruit came, after the soldier who wore Nyder's new helmet stepped on a land mine. They stripped the trembling boy-soldier of his supplies, and then turned their backs. It was Nyder who told the new recruit where he could sleep, and suggested that he keep his head down.

In gratitude, he came to Nyder's sleepbag that night. Nyder had never known what it was like to be touched by another to give pleasure rather than take it: to be kissed instead of slapped, licked instead of bitten. He peaked fast, shuddering all through as though his bones would break, but when he whispered his willingness to return the favour, his partner whispered back that he was too scared to get it up.

They huddled together instead, keeping each other warm, and it was dreadfully awkward to figure out how to get comfortable and still be able to reach their weapons, but they slept together.

And the next day the new recruit was dead; he stepped around a rock to take a piss, and did not return. They found him slumped there, with a look of surprise on his face and a red slit under one arm from a knife blade. They never found the killer. The other soldiers' eyes were sharp on Nyder, and he was careful to keep all emotion out of his face as they parted out the rest of the gear between them.

He had to force himself to try and help the next replacements, and they died anyway. The other soldiers were starting to mutter, and after Jaou stepped wrong and went into crunch-wire that contracted and stripped the flesh from his bones, they cornered Nyder and suggested, strongly, that he not try talking to the next recruit. That he ignore the new ones, like the rest of them did, because obviously he was somehow shitting it up for them.

And before the new one could even give his name to Sergeant Ralt, he said in an excited voice, "Are there really Thals out there?" popped up and looked over the edge of the trench, and a stray bullet took him square in the forehead. He fell backwards in a spray of red.

The other soldiers stood there, dead-eyed. Equally blank, Nyder wiped the splattered brains off his face and said in a calm voice, "Perhaps you'd like his toothbrush?"

He kept his calm in the face of their snarls. And from then on, he was allowed to talk to the new arrivals. Sometimes when they asked why, he would tell them about a man named Erem, who had been kind to him.

* * *

The truth was, everyone died. The new enlistees, the old soldiers, everyone died. The new ones just died faster. And when a gas barrage took out everyone in the unit except Nyder and two other men (Ralt strangled while holding his gas mask grimly to the face of one of his downed men, not knowing that both their wounds were fatal), the three of them went back to the Dome, and got new assignments.

Before they entered the Dome itself, the two older soldiers showed Nyder how to cache his best gear, because otherwise the Dome military clerks would just take it and give it to new soldiers. If they showed up with the bare minimum of gear, they might get punished, but they also might get new equipment.

Of course when Nyder got his assignment and went back to the hidden cache, the other two soldiers had got there first. He looked bleakly at the little empty hole in the ground, before taking out his new map and old compass and heading out to his new section.

* * *

Nyder detested his second posting. His commander, Corporal Dert, was a lecher who insisted on obtaining sexual favours from every man in his unit as often as possible. It was standard operating procedure, of course; but Nyder exerted himself to please with his mouth and hands, so as not to have to offer up anything else.

Nyder's attempts to keep as clean as possible were a source of amusement to his new unit. But when a particularly nasty species of lice took hold among them, and Nyder had the only nit comb, things changed. Nyder refused to give it up, saying that the other men might lose it; to be fair, they had tried to steal it from him several times. His compromise was that he would comb the soldiers himself. They submitted to this, and perhaps even thought it kind.

When one of the more vile-minded soldiers loudly and lewdly insisted that Nyder comb him all over, Nyder carefully wiped the comb with treated oil to kill any leftover nits and did so. The soldier hadn't realised how sharp the fine tines of the metal comb were, and how painstakingly Nyder could drag them against him, just on the edge between necessity and pain. He'd been planning on bringing himself off during the combing; instead he broke and fled, limp as a dead man, before Nyder half-finished scraping his pubes clean. He endured the lice, and later the discomfort of shaving his body hair, rather than be touched by Nyder again.

Except for such unpleasant incidents as that, though, it was more of the same. He marched through the mud, crawled through the dust, slept in the dirt, shot at figures just as ragged and muddy as he was, dodged bullets, sweated in his gas mask, hid and ran and killed. Sometimes he cried out to the Horned God in his fear, begging Him for aid: but Nyder never felt anything in return. And he was usually hungry, always thirsty, and finding it harder and harder to be kind.

It was Dert who found the dead Thal, fifteen weeks after Nyder had joined his unit. The body was still leaking fresh blood, and although the hair was cropped as short as any of theirs, it was definitely a female Thal. Dert gloated, actually rubbed his hands together with delight, and announced that all the enlisted men would have a go at the corpse after him.

"You're mad," said Nyder, with exquisite bad timing. If he'd held his tongue for half a second, the whooping from the other soldiers would have drowned out his words.

"C'mon, you coward, you afraid of even a dead Thal, eh?" Dert turned his ruddy face to Nyder, flushed with his own excitement and that of his men. "If you're so afraid, you little son of a shit, then go. We're setting up camp, here."

The Corporal quickly arranged for the sentries and the watch lists, before stripping off his trousers and going to stand over the dead woman's body. He pulled his prick out and started pissing on her face, saying that it was to wash off some of the Thal smell; the other men clustered round, half-interested and half-frightened. There were strict regulations, terrible stories told in training: orders were to never touch a dead Thal or disturb their bodies. But if Dert was willing to go first….

Nyder was not on watch, so he crept away and curled up in his sleepbag. He listened to the shouts and yells of the men as they urged each other on, posed and mounted the cooling corpse. He shivered with cold, and sleep was a long time arriving. Even looking at the sky didn't help, because it was a cloudy and moonless night.

In the morning Nyder rejoined the others, tried to ignore their blows and their boasts, and resolutely refused to talk about it. There was no sign of the dead Thal, but a rusty red stain on the hard-packed mud suggested that the body had been abused even more after he had left.

It took until noon for Corporal Dert to collapse; the others started to go after that.

The Thal woman had been wearing a poison-laced pessary that only secreted its contents at less than core body temperature; the Kaled men, completely unfamiliar with women, had not detected it. A nerve poison that operated on skin contact, fatal in even miniscule doses, which rotted the men's nerves from the groin outwards. The pain was unbearable; some of the men drew their daggers and tried to cut the poisoned flesh from the bodies. This did not save them. It was Nyder who grabbed the youngest soldier, who swore up and down that he hadn't touched the woman, and headed towards the nearest permanent camp to try and get help.

They sent Nyder back to the Dome from the camp, along with certain tainted sections of Kaled skin and muscle (the youngest soldier had lied) in a bucket, so that his report could be taken, and the poison could be analysed for a possible antidote.

A bored-looking clerk took his report, typing it out for the official records. The doctors scrutinised him with humiliating thoroughness in Dome hospital, took new samples of all his fluids and bits of skin as well, ran him through a Fitness to Serve test and looked disappointed that he passed. And then they sent him back out.

He left with the contents of a paper recycling bin hidden in his pack. Again and again he would study those papers: discarded requisitions forms and a precious torn personnel record. How were they made? How did the computer know how to put these numbers and facts after this name, and not others? Could the computer be changed? Erem had said not, but there had to be a way. Nyder couldn't prove to other men that he was better than them, but if he could only convince the computer, somehow…

* * *

He went on living.

Nothing seemed important anymore, not kindness, not happiness, nothing except staying alive, sleep and food. He slept whenever he got a chance, and he ate whatever he could find: food pills, rodents, grass, insects, even scavenged Thal food. Once his unit dug up a canister of triple-sealed food packets that looked pre-War; Nyder thought that the strangely fluffy and fangless polla pictured on the front had something to do with the green crunchy pellets inside, which tasted nothing like polla meat. But he couldn't read all of the words on the packet. 'Tasty Treats for your (something) Polla!' it said, and he stared at that unknown word, munching and wondering.

He memorised the faces of everyone he met. But he rarely saw the same face more than once, and grew more and more certain that he was remembering only the dead. When he did see a face he recognised, after weeks or months, it always seemed that there was something gone from it, hollowed out from the inside.

He wondered what was gone from his own. He wondered what he was losing, every night when he fell asleep and realised that there had not been one moment of happiness in the previous day, or the day before, or the day before…

He thought back to the Children's Barracks; there had been at least ten-hundred children there. Perhaps eight hundred in the Trainee Barracks. But he never saw a face he remembered from growing up. It was as though none of them had ever existed. The Wastelands seemed to be a world where everyone died. Except for him. He joined a new unit, he watched as new recruits came and died, he watched as the older soldiers died, and when there weren't enough men left to make up a unit, the survivors headed back to the Dome for reassignment.

He hoped that this lack of dying wasn't some sort of blessing from the God of War. If it was, Nyder would kill Him for it.  



	4. Called Home

  
Nyder sat on the bank of the river, under a bush, and shivered. His hands touched the worn pommel of his service dagger for reassurance, counting the many notches cut into it, radiating out like a starshell burst from the centre. He was wet and cold; even his feet were wet. The far bank of the river was almost hidden in the mist, and nothing seemed to be moving there, but he had a bad feeling. 

What a perfect place this riverbank would be for an ambush: with the river on one side and the high clay bank on the other, there was nowhere to run and hide, unless you wanted to dive into the river and dare the grups. He could see their filthy black snouts poking out of the filthier water on occasion: great bullet-shaped swimming mammals, meat-eaters and fierce.

What Nyder was wondering was if he should tell his officers about his feeling. He had not actually seen any Thals over on the far side. There was not a track, not a sound, not a whiff of smoke, not a single wink of dawn sunlight on metal to tell him that there was anything over there. But still, he sensed there was someone or someones. Waiting.

His new section's commander was Lieutenant Frenn, and Nyder hated him with a passion. The man actually seemed to be enjoying the war: he was forever coming up with strategies and plans and cunning attacks, and Nyder and the rest of the men were the ones who had to sweat and bleed and die for them. The Lieutenant was like a fighting machine: if Nyder broke his head open, he imagined he would find nothing but wires and gears and ticking machinery inside. Now Frenn was planning on moving his men along the riverbank, fast, to get around the latest Thal troop in this sector and take them from behind.

Nyder couldn't care less that Frenn's strategies were a success. That he was freeing more and more territory from the Thals, and possibly weakening them in this sector permanently. All he cared about was that he'd been in three times as many fire fights under this maniac as he had with his previous units, and there had to be a way to stop it. Nyder had already been rotated back to the Dome once, to recover from a spear wound through the calf that got infected. If the calf had not healed up to full strength, he could have been culled on the spot.

He could ask for transfer to another unit, of course. He could ask for the moons as his playthings, if he wanted, but he wouldn't get them. Or he could desert, or simply cut his own throat: both would kill him just as surely.

But if Nyder went back, and reported that the riverbank seemed safe…and the unit all went through here, with the Lieutenant at the head as always…maybe he would get a chance to transfer after all. Especially if he said he was scouting the back trail, and let most of the others go over the top first.

* * *

Nyder was right. There were Thals on the other side of the river, but they didn't have bows and rifles; they had grenade launchers and rockets and two field cannon. Lieutenant Frenn had been hitting them hard in this sector, and they'd pulled out the heavy equipment to stop him once and for all.

The riverbank exploded, raining down death and fire. Nyder seemed to see the debris moving in slow motion; he jumped to one side, evading a rolling boulder twice his size, and started to scrabble away, grimly keeping his head down. There was no point in going back and trying to help: he could hear no firing from the Kaleds, only the thunder of the Thal cannon and the screams of dying men, and the deep grunts of the grups as they fed.

He crawled backwards, over a body that sat up and looked him in the face and shouted, "Private!"

It was Frenn, of all people. He must have been blown clear over the ridge by the blast. His uniform was in tatters, and his hair smoked, but his voice was still sharp with authority…and he had no weapons in his hands.

Nyder's hand was on a rock, nicely sized for gripping.

It turned out that there weren't wires and gears in Frenn's head after all. Just brains, wet and white and loose after Nyder cracked his skull open.

He spat in the dead man's face, and ran.

* * *

He was back in the Dome, giving his report to one of the droning clerks, no different from the dozens of other clerks spread out through the great room, typing away at identical mechanical typewriters as soldiers gave their statements.

Nyder breathed in clean air, slowly measuring each breath. He was feeling very close to breaking right now, very close to just running around and screaming and that would be bad. Very bad. Behaviour that on the battlefield would be treated with a slap and being tied into your sleepbag for the night could get you culled in here.

But he tasted the air, and it tasted like home. Home, the only home he had ever known. He wanted to be here, here where the sky wasn't always above you threatening to drop rain or snow or mortar rounds on you. He wanted a decent ceiling above him, and tile floors that did not hide mines or serpents or traps. He wanted to stay here in the Dome. And this clerk, grey-haired and narrow-eyed, he must have been here for years, decades even, he must know a way!

"I'm sorry, Private," the man said in the same even tone he had used throughout the interview. "There's no possibility of you not taking a new assignment." His eyes were a flat dead brown, and he sat very still on his chair, a bit too still. If Nyder had been in better condition, not so tired and desperate, he would have read the man's lack of body language as being the sign of a deeply ill man.

But instead Nyder kept talking, trying to find the words that would unlock the door. He knew that he was probably making a miserable impression, in his mud and tatters, but he couldn't seem to shut himself up. "I've been out in seven different assignments with no breaks! Seven different units…aren't I at least due some leave?" He tapped his hands together on the edge of the desk, as though clapping nervously and silently.

"No leave until the current emergency is suspended," the man said, his fingers rock-steady on the heavy keys. "The emergency is up for review in nineteen-"

"I can read, you know." The man stopped, and Nyder went on desperately, "Read the letters, not just the Approved Words. And I can count pretty well, and I know all about the war, about fighting, about the Thals. Shouldn't I be here, teaching the new trainees, instead of out there?" He gestured wildly with one hand, then caught one of the scowling guards' eyes and put it back on the desk, flat out as though pleading a little. "Shouldn't I be here, to tell them what it's really going to be like, what they really need to be ready for? There's so much I could teach them-"

"Of course not," the clerk said. "Do you have an exceptional skill or talent that you could demonstrate for the Education Board, that would allow you to be a teacher?"

Nyder was silent at that. He wasn't a great hand-to-hand fighter like Erem, or a flawless marksman, or a great strategist. He had no real idea why he had lasted this long. Being small, and willing to duck, keeping his head down and his feet dry - those couldn't be the secrets to survival, could they?

But the clerk was still talking. "And the last thing we need is someone riling up the students with what it's really like outside. They'd all hang themselves, and then where would we be for soldiers?" He squeezed the casing of the typewriter, and it creaked: the clerks were in the habit of picking up the heavy machines and putting them down, using them as impromptu exercise equipment in-between interviews. The clerk's hair might be grey, but his shoulders and arms were thick with muscle under his official tunic.

"Shouldn't I get a promotion?" People did get promoted, eventually, and there was always the dream of making a level that would get you transferred to Command Complex. "Someday?" His voice broke as it had not in years.

"You are bothering me." The clerk suddenly leaned forward, and his eyes showed white all around the edges. "You should not be bothering me."

Nyder was so tired that he didn't react to this menace; he just leaned forward a little in turn, closer to the man, both hands out as though pleading, and asked, "Can't you just-"

The clerk stood in one swift motion and with that same motion picked up his typewriter as though it were a foam-light pillow. Nyder stared at the man, and did not react as the great square metal weight came smashing down onto his own hands.

There was pain: pain too great to be comprehended all at once, pain that froze him in his seat when he should have leaped or run or just fallen backwards. He was in the Dome, he was supposed to be safe here, this couldn't be happening to him, why-

The clerk raised the typewriter, now horribly wet along the bottom, and brought it down again; this time Nyder could hear the wet creaking of his bones splintering. He could also hear the guards shouting, other clerks shouting and moving, but louder than all of them was the clerk above him hissing, spittle dotting Nyder's cheeks as he spat, "Stop bothering me!"

He couldn't get his feet out and up to kick at the man; they'd never taught him how to fight around a desk. Before he could decide how to defend himself, the pain struck him like a grenade blast, and he fell, screaming. The clerk was screaming as well, howling mad obscenities, before the guards came and hauled him off. Tired of Nyder's thrashing, someone from Medical finally pressed a syringe to his shoulder.

* * *

Nyder woke up in hospital. He knew hospital, the smell of it, but this wasn't like any ward he had ever seen. It was a single long room, stretching out of sight in a curve; it might even be against the inside of the Dome. Which made no sense: why put a hospital ward where it was most likely to be contaminated?

The hospital beds were lined up with the heads against the wall down one side, and the beds were all occupied: but there were no intravenous drip bags to be seen. No limbs raised with slings or casts, no medical machinery. The smell of iodine and disinfectant was fainter here, somehow: but the smell of rot and piss was twice as strong. The men in the beds around him just lay there, still, too still; the one next to Nyder had his eyes half-open, but didn't even twitch at Nyder's movement. He was still wearing his uniform.

There were no doctors. He craned his head upwards from the thin pillow, and saw that the doorframe was painted black. He lay back and squeezed his eyes shut, as hard as he possibly could, to keep the tears trapped.

This was the culling ward. This was where they brought the wounded men with Level One injuries. Injuries that meant they could never be soldiers or machine operators or clerks. Or teachers. Injuries like damaged eyesight, head trauma - and non-repairable limb injuries.

His hands…

The doctor would come, a different doctor every day according to the rumours. He would work his way down the row of men, starting with the ones who had been here the longest, and use a poison injector to end their lives. There were only so many bodies that the Dome recycling plants could handle in one day. And when the recycling limit was reached, he would stop; they would take away the dead bodies, and move all the beds sideway, along the wall. There would be new wounded moved in, every night. And when Nyder's bed reached the head of the line, the needle would slide into him and his life would come out. Would he feel it?

He went to clench his fists: a mistake, because the pain roared awake in his hands. He did not scream, but every nerve in him howled as he felt the torn muscles and broken bones move, like a dead flopping animal at the end of his arm. Two dead flopping animals. He looked down: they'd put his hands on his chest and wrapped them loosely in red-stained bandages, but that was all. No splints, no signs of surgery.

He thought that if he screamed, they might bring him painkiller. Or they might tie him to the bed and gag him; he could see others along the row fastened that way. Or just poison him out of hand, and let his corpse be rolled up the line. They were only leaving him alive to keep the smell down.

So he lay immobile, with his eyes half-closed as though in a stupor, forcing his muscles still. He lay with his eyes half-open, ignoring the pain and the thirst and the itching, watching as the medical assistants rolled new beds into place, moved his bed closer to the head of the line, opened and closed cabinets. He had to make sure that it was a different assistant every time. Make sure that there were no cameras here, nobody to watch. He lay there in his own filth, burning in the fires of his crushed and possibly dying hands, and counted to himself. Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine….

When it was night-cycle and the culling ward was dark and quiet except for the rasping breaths of the dying, he slithered out of the hospital bed. He landed badly, on elbow and knees and one hand, but he did not cry out. His hand left a red mark on the floor, and he carefully wiped it up with his sleeve before it dried.

He read the clipboard at the foot of his bed. Squinting in the gloom, he read the other clipboards. They were all the same, annotated by hand with name and culling basis and admission date. His eyes desperately looked for a way to mark the forms Return for Surgery, or Transfer, but none of the little boxes said anything like that: only a place to record his biomass for the rendering machines.

The blank forms were kept in a locked cabinet. It was a pushbutton lock, and he'd seen the bored-looking medical assistants push the buttons, but Nyder couldn't. His hands were useless, his elbow was too big, his nose was too soft, his tongue wasn't strong enough. And there was no way for him to get his boots off and use his toes - even if he could somehow stand on one leg for long enough.

He lay down on the floor. He pressed the side of his face to the cold tile floor and cried, holding his broken hands to his chest. There was no way to leave: the door was locked, there were cameras all through the Dome, and he couldn't fight or scavenge or survive without hands. He rocked himself back and forth. He was cold and shaking, and he hurt, and all he wanted to do was lie down and sleep and never wake up.

Live, said a voice inside of him. You're too good to die like this, live!

He went over the entire ward, and finally found a pen with a splintered shaft, discarded behind a recycling bin. He toed it out into the light, and examined it. There was ink left in it, a little ink. And there was enough of the shaft to clutch in his teeth and push the cabinet buttons. The splinters bit into his gums, but he didn't care; he could swallow the blood.

While that ink lasted, he had a chance.

* * *

After the debacle in the interview centre, it took a few days for Nyder's computer record to be updated with his current status: Level One injuries, sent to be culled.

That update set an alarum off inside the Dome computers: a silent alarum. A day later, a sheet of paper spat out of a printer in the Kaled Elite Bunker, and was brought to the desk of Davros' second in command, Security Commander Slai.

Slai read the short cryptic message, // SPIRE PRJ // NYDER 42018861// L1I - Cl // and frowned. Davros had set the computer to give alerts at changes to six records: those of Eisel, Lett, Nyder, Marb, Borr, and Nettek. If he had the opportunity, Slai was supposed to interview them. But this one was already marked Cl for Cull, and the update was days old: he was probably gone. When Slai had gone to interview the last one to return, Nettek, he'd found the man with half his face shot off, too drugged to speak.

Also, it was night-cycle: Davros was not available to consult. But Slai was a bit curious, and a bit bored, so he decided to go see if this Nyder was still alive.

He had no problem getting the passes to enter the Dome, and he knew the master code for the culling ward. He opened the door, took one step inside, and bent over, comically far, to prevent himself from tripping over someone. That someone was a young man, very young, who knelt on the floor and stared up at Slai with huge dark eyes. The man's hands were cupped protectively against his chest, and there was something clenched in his teeth.

Slai got his balance back, then reached down with one hand and plucked the thing out of the man's teeth. Those teeth immediately started chattering with fear. He looked at it, and saw it was a shattered pen. He looked at the empty bunk, the last one in the row, and the clipboard at the foot of it, and the pen, and he began to laugh.

Slai had a great booming laugh, befitting his size. He laughed and laughed, feet apart now and hands on hips, as the dying stirred and muttered at the noise, and the man who could only be Nyder cowered at his feet.  



	5. Shadow

  
Supreme Commander Davros, leader of the Kaled people and greatest scientist on the planet, did not get up in the morning. Nor did he strictly speaking wake up in the morning. It would be most accurate to say that he started up in the morning.

Horribly maimed by a Thal shell attack many years before, Davros' body was kept alive by a mechanical bio-support chair that also replaced the function of his legs. The chair was shaped like a waist-high pillar studded with metal half-spheres, and the scientist's torso was melded to the top of it, where his sole remaining arm and palsied hand could reach the bank of controls in front of him. The attack had destroyed his vision and his hearing: artificial tympanums now nestled in his ears, and a vision implant stared from the centre of his forehead, above his permanently shut eyes.

He did not sleep, or dream. His life, every moment of his existence, was devoted to one purpose: to the survival of his race, to their triumph over the Thals, and over Skaro. He had plans, plans dazzling and terrifying in their implications: plans that had taken years to test, decades to nurture along. His plans were growing closer to completion now, close enough that some aspects of them had to be hidden from those who would not understand them.

This morning, after he had tested his support chair and himself and found both to be functional, he rolled into the main laboratory, and saw Security Commander Slai waiting for him, as he did every morning. But there was something odd. Slai looked the same, black hair slicked back, square chin perfectly shaved, his muscular body dressed in a spotless Security Elite uniform, but - Davros sent a restart signal to his vision implant, and it flickered for an instant. It was as though there was something behind Slai, something his shape but smaller. Some sort of lag in the image processing?

"Davros," said Slai, saluting. Then he cleared his throat, and a strange man stepped out from behind him and saluted as well. He was short, and slim enough that Slai had totally eclipsed him. And when he raised his hand to salute, he showed it to be heavily bandaged, with external fixator pins sticking out here and there.

Davros moved a bit closer, and the strange man shivered, but held his ground. He was young and he wore a Security Elite uniform; but there was tan and chapping on his face, standing out in sharp contrast to his shaved scalp. Clear signs of his being stationed outside the Dome…which the Elite never were.

"This is Security Trainee Nyder," said Slai.

If Davros' heart was not an electrically-driven device, it might have stopped right there from the shock of that title and that name, combined. None of this showed on his face: his facial muscles were long-paralysed by injury and age. He managed to keep the stress out of his words as he rasped in his electronically augmented voice, "This is an unexpected addition to our personnel roster, Slai."

"But not an unwelcome one?" Slai challenged, and Davros detected the challenge.

"Perhaps…we could discuss this in my office. Now."

"As you wish. Trainee, this is my desk. Sit here, read all the papers in that pile and that pile, but not that pile," Slai said, pointing. "Wait for me to return."

"Yes, Commander," Nyder said, and saluted again. When he went to sit down, he had to pull the chair away from the desk with his foot, but once it was out he seated himself promptly enough, and started reading, eyes locked on the papers in front of him. He couldn't turn the pages, so he carefully pushed each one aside with the flat of his bandaged hand as he was done with it.

The Elite scientists and guards in the main laboratory went back to their work, curiously darting glances at the man reading Slai's reports. Only one man dared approach and talk to him.

"I'm Scientist Frenton," he said, self-consciously keeping his hands at his sides. The Security Trainee obviously could not shake hands.

Nyder looked up, and then looked Frenton up and down with a bland expression. "So you are," he finally said, and went back to the papers.

"What happened to your hands?" Frenton asked.

This time Nyder's eyes rose and stayed on the other man's face as he said, in a tone just a little bit too quiet and controlled, "I'm not at liberty to say."

Frenton decided to go back to work.

* * *

In Davros' office, Slai stood at parade rest, his feet spread and chin up. Davros was planted in front of him, his feebly shivering hand the only thing that moved about him.

Davros spoke first. "Why is there a Standard man in a Security Elite uniform in my Bunker, and why are you training him?"

"Because he isn't Standard, and we both know it." Slai grinned, showing square white teeth spaced a bit unevenly in his mouth. "He's Spire Project; I switched his paperwork from Elite to Standard myself, on your orders. And per your orders, I was to interview any member of the Spire Project who returned to the Dome, to evaluate if their Elite genetic heritage had given them any advantages. Unfortunately, most of the time they were in and out before I could talk to them in secret. In this case, Nyder returned and I went to find him."

Slai's eyes grew distant for a moment. "I nearly tripped over him, in fact; he was in the culling ward. He'd been in there four days."

"The ward usually cycles faster than that," Davros objected.

Slai grinned even wider. "That it does. According to Nyder, he found a pen and used it to open the admissions form cabinet. He wrote a new form for himself, and another one for a man just admitted, and switched the admission dates. Then he moved the other man's bed to his slot, and his own to the foot of the line. And then he did it again, and again. Gaining him another day each time.

"And any man who can do that - who can sentence his fellow soldiers to death, who can club them unconscious with his elbows if they protest, just so that he can live one more day in agony - his hands were crushed, by the way - a man like that is a man I want on my side. Because I sure don't want him waiting for me in the afterlife."

Davros was so agitated that he ignored the chance to jape at Slai's superstitions. "His hands were crushed? Then he's useless-"

"No. The Dome doctors might not be interested in fixing him, but our doctor says he'll get at least eighty percent functionality back. His sense of touch will be so-so," Slai sawed his own hand back and forth in the air, "and he'll have to wear gloves. But for my role, he should-"

"For your role?" Davros wheeled closer: first he had thought his vision implant was not working, now his hearing seemed to be defective. "You intend this - this unknown quantity, this experimental subject, to take on your role?"

"But think of it, Davros!" Slai's eyes were bright. "I can spend years, decades even, training him and getting him up to speed! All the Security Elite I've tested have been too hidebound, too afraid to break the rules, too used to dealing with the Elite to see their deceptions. Nyder won't be like that! And when it does come time to replace me," Slai's voice paused for a moment; both he and Davros know that Security Commanders tended to die on the job, without warning and quite violently, "he'll be ready."

"But does he have command experience? He wasn't chosen for Command Track, none of the Spire Project were."

"Command?" Slai chuckled deep in his throat, and leaned towards Davros as though sharing a delightful secret. "When I caught him changing the charts, he begged me not to expose him. He confessed to everything, he pleaded, he cried, he offered me anything he had - as though he had anything. And then he stood up, and looked me in the eye, and he ordered me not to tell. And I obeyed."

Davros took a moment to process this. "You…obeyed."

"I did. For a heartbeat, for an instant, that wretch who barely came up to my shoulder, stinking and broken, completely helpless and marked for death, held my will with nothing but his eyes and his voice. As though he had me in the palm of his hand…such as it was."

"I will have to think," said Davros, and froze, his chair audibly clamping itself to the floor of his office. Slai knew that sound; it meant that Davros was going to ignore all external distractions while he pondered this new development. Slai waited, at attention as always.

He did not mention to Davros what had most deeply impressed him about Nyder's bid for survival. The part of his confession that had frightened even Slai.

The dying were not given food or water - why waste precious supplies on someone about to be recycled? But Nyder, although hungry, was certainly not dying of thirst when Slai found him. And there was only one source of liquid in the culling ward, and that was the wounded.

Slai pictured Nyder moving from bed to bed, pulling at stitches with his teeth, opening wounds with lips and tongue and drinking the blood of his fellow Kaleds. The mortally wounded would be too weak to resist, and if they did Nyder would use his elbows. And when his thirst was sated, he would clean himself and go lie down in his hospital bed, now the one closest to the door. And sleep. The thought awoke something that was both admiration and horror in Slai.

Davros twitched, returning to reality. "I will allow this new phase of the Spire Project," he finally rasped. "It will be interesting to chart the subject's learning curve, and see where he fails." Without further words, Davros rolled past Slai, heading out of the office and back to the main laboratory. Slai followed, his broad face just a little bit smug. He was certain already, right to the core of him, that Nyder would not fail.

* * *

Security Trainee Nyder sat in his new quarters, on his new bunk, and literally quivered with excitement. He'd been quivering all day, inside: only now, in private where nobody could see, did he let the shaking take him, take him and set him trembling until the tears were ready to start from his eyes with happiness.

He was alive!

He had been certain when the huge Security man caught him in the culling ward that it was the end. But instead of killing him, the huge man said "Follow me," and took Nyder out of the ward, through the vast strange hallways of the Dome, and further. They had gone down a concrete-lined tunnel, slanting down into the earth, and it had taken Nyder a long time to realise where he was going.

The Bunker. The Scientific Elite and their laboratories. His throat had choked at the thought: there were stories about hideous experiments done here. Is that what they wanted him for? Had he stepped out of the firefight and into the mine field? But instead of taking him to some cell or laboratory, the man had gone to a small hospital, full of all sorts of advanced-looking medical equipment. He went to a doctor in a medical tunic, had Nyder lay his hands out on a table like two horrible trophies, and said, "What can you make of these?"

The doctor had frowned, cut away the bandages and frowned some more (Nyder didn't dare to look at what must be under those bandages; at least there was no smell of infection from them). Finally the doctor had come out with a long string of words that Nyder didn't understand.

"Please repeat that in Kaled," the Security man had said.

"Well, the length of time the wounds have been left untreated will complicate things: but if his circulation can be repaired and muscle regeneration proceeds appropriately, we won't need to transplant. They can be brought back to acceptable functional levels."

Nyder had sagged, and the Security man had caught him under the armpits. Then there was a breathing mask over his face: he breathed in and the world went away.

When he woke up he was lying in a real hospital bed. He wore a proper patient robe, and he'd been shaved, all over. A relief: the lice had been one of the many torments of the culling ward. His hands still hurt, and now his arms did too. When he stiffly raised one arm a little, he saw it was bandaged from armpits to fingertips. His hands were two flat fuzzy paddles of bandage, with metal screws sticking out of them.

The man in the medical tunic came in and introduced himself as Doctor Cennell. He explained that the screws were to hold Nyder's hands flat on two armatures, while they healed. He talked a lot about tendon splicing and skin grafts, and pointed where they had taken bits from his arms, skin and under his skin, to fix his hands. There would be more surgeries to come, he warned Nyder direly.

Nyder just turned his hand back and forth a little bit, staring at it, a great white puffy thing at the end of his arm. But it was going to be fixed, and why would they do that if -

"I'm not just an experiment, am I?" he asked Cennell. "You don't do all this for someone you're going to experiment on, yes?"

"No, most of our biological experiments deal with genes, heredity. We don't do surgical testing," Cennell said. "You're not just an experiment."

And after a night of sleep, wonderful sleep, after three full meals and all the water he wanted the next day, and a real doctor to examine his wounds, and more sleep, the Security man came back with a bundle of black cloth.

"My name is Security Commander Slai," he said, with a grin as huge as he was. "You will call me Commander. Let's see how this fits on you." Nyder needed help to get on the black puffy-legged trousers, and the long boots. The black undershirt could be stretched and pulled over his bandages. And the black jacket that went over that had zippers up both sleeves, which was the only way Slai could get it on over Nyder's immobilised hands.

"Why does this have zippers like this - Commander?" Nyder said. Slai's uniform didn't have zippers.

Slai looked almost abashed for a moment. "It's for executions, actually. So you can cuff a man's hands behind his back and strip it off anyway."

"Oh." Nyder had to adjust the hang of the jacket by digging his arms into his sides and wriggling, and he was still doing this when it hit home.

Black boots, black trousers and jacket, lightning-struck eye embroidered on the collar that he could just see out of the corner of his eye. This was a Security Elite uniform.

He said that to Slai, so shocked that his voice squeaked, and Slai just roared with laughter. "Trainee first. Security Trainees wear the same uniform, just with a white armband." He fixed the armband to Nyder's sleeve with straight pins, so that the zipper still worked. Then he put one finger under Nyder's chin and raised his face - even Slai's fingers were huge - and looked him straight in the eye.

"Security Trainee first," Slai said in a soft voice. "Security Elite, after. And if you're as good as I think you are - there are no limits."

No limits.

No limits at all. The Bunker, he'd never dreamed of being assigned to the Bunker. Being here was like magic, real magic. He had no more believed that he could ever be one of the Elite than he had thought that he could become an avatar of the Horned God. Now he had his own room! They were going to fix his hands! And food; there were no ration tickets here, he could get all the food he wanted, eat until he was full every day. Eat until he was more than full, eat until he was bursting-

Until he got fat, a voice suddenly whispered in the back of his head - an unfamiliar voice. Like Nenno.

Nyder cringed, his hands going over his chest. His stomach shuddered as though he was going to be sick, but grimly he clenched his teeth and held his meal down.

Maybe eating to bursting wasn't such a good idea after all.

Slai had left a magnetic hook on a hinged metal arm fastened to one wall; Nyder used it to undo the zippers on his shoulders. He painstakingly manoeuvred to open his jodhpurs, which was what the puffy trousers were called. The fork-shaped metal prong on one of the bunk legs helped him get off the boots. When he was finally naked, as hairless and bare as the day he was born except for the bandages, he simply stood in the middle of the room and spun, his wounded arms stretched wide, smiling and smiling as though he could take in the whole world in one embrace.

Alive!  



	6. Echo

Nyder was a long time undergoing restorative surgery, recovering from each operation only to go under the scalpel again. The entire process was excruciating, but he endured. The day came when Cennell pronounced that the worst was over, removed the fixator screws and the external armatures, sealed the wounds, and cleared him for normal activity such as bathing. The doctor thought it would be rather a relief for Nyder to be able to use the regular showers, rather than being scrubbed by the medical staff every other morning.

Nyder had been dreading the prospect, actually. He'd kept a little apart from the regular Security Elite men, but he was certain they could tell he was not like them. His size, his manner, his accent, all marked him as Standard. And what better place to put him down, to put him in his place, than in the showers where everyone would be naked and unarmed?

But there were no private showers in Trainee quarters, and he wasn't quite familiar enough with Slai to dare to ask to use his. So he gritted his teeth and donned a thick cloth bathing robe and rubber gloves that rolled up over the punctured, raw skin of his hands and sealed themselves at mid-forearm. It was normal procedure to wear clothes to the shower room, then strip: but Nyder's fingers were still as stiff as old leather, and he didn't want to stand there fumbling with his clothes. Or risk being trapped, tangled in his own garments when they attacked.

If they attacked, he reminded himself. If.

He went to the shower room, hung his robe on a hook in the locker area, and went inside with a steady tread and a blank face.

He had been half-hoping to have the place to himself, but there were several guards there, talking and laughing as they scrubbed themselves under the hot steamy water. They were all tall, lean and muscular. Perfect specimens of Kaled masculinity. Nyder felt very small and tattered next to them.

They fell silent as he entered, and watched as he soaked himself down, scrubbed himself all over with soap, rinsed and rinsed again. He gave himself an extra minute under the hot water, letting it redden his skin, enjoying the feel of the heat on his scalp, before turning off the showerhead and leaving. The Elite men hadn't said a word to him, and as he stood in the locker area and carefully wiped himself dry with a towel - he couldn't press too hard with his hands or they ached - he wondered what sort of stories they would tell about him once he was gone.

Might as well let them get on with it, then. He put on the bathing robe, pulled the hood up over his bristling hair (it had grown out just long enough to cover the lice scars), and stalked out. He could shave in his quarters, if he used both hands.

In the shower room, the men were waiting to hear the sound of the door closing behind Nyder; then there was a burst of conversation, just as he had feared. But the content was not what he would have expected.

"Did you see those scars?" said Jula, over the hissing of the water. "He looks like he's been in every battle in the war!"

The little Trainee's scars were quite a shock to the Elite, who had never faced battlefield duty. His arms had been slashed in a disturbingly mechanical-looking way, neat patterns of parallel scars, and there were other scars, across his back and chest, on his calf; even one of his feet had a pink dimple of scar tissue. The body of a soldier, who'd fought in the Wastelands and survived. Combined with Nyder's mysterious origins and cold manner, it was all quite an impressive package.

"And who wears rubber gloves in the shower?" wondered another guard.

"Maybe they're mechanical hands. Or he's an experiment," suggested Jula. "Maybe he's got the touch of death, or something."

Knowing Davros, that would be possible.

* * *

Doctor Cennell located a book on therapeutic hand exercises for his patient. Nyder read the book with tight concentration, did every exercise exactly as many times as it said to and no more, and eventually regained movement and control, made his fingers work again. His arms and hands would never be as strong as they had been, and he would bear the scars for the rest of his life, but he could pull a trigger or cut a throat - "All the important things in life," Slai would chuckle.

He taught himself even as he rebuilt himself. Once he could hold a pen, he scrawled down every word he read or heard that he didn't understand, then looked them up later in the dictionary and learned them by heart. He read every rule addendum and supply form and personnel registration slip, memorising them, analysing them. He even taught himself to type, first with a pen in his fist, then with two fingers and finally four.

And he watched: watched and listened. As carefully as he had imitated the other children in the Barracks, he imitated the Elite. He purged profanity from his vocabulary, and the Standard accent from his speech. He walked straighter, held his head higher. He was always watching, always working to improve himself.

He was working for Davros, an incalculable privilege. He sometimes actually saw him, was close enough to touch him. Not that he ever did, of course: Davros' body was old, frail, and prone to infection. Slai had told him once that Davros was never to be touched with a bare hand, never touched at all unless it was specifically necessary, and Nyder remembered that. He remembered everything.

Finally he was in a situation where he could learn as fast as he was able, where nobody would tell him to stop or slow down or do it over so that someone else could keep up. He gulped down Security procedures, interrogation protocols, command tree nomenclature, scientific glossaries. He was fascinated by science, by what the Elite Scientists were creating here. It was a way of making the Kaled race invincible, and immortal. Make them the final victors in the war. It was victory, total victory, and he was honoured to be a part of it.

* * *

Nyder had been under Slai's training for months before he dared offer himself to the man. He'd been expecting the order to kneel or to spread for a long time; almost all of his superiors had asked it of him at some point or another. Then he'd decided that Slai just didn't find him attractive. Fair enough; Nyder could agree with that. But he didn't seem to be bedding any of the other men either. And something in Nyder told him that he should try to repay Slai for everything the man had done for him.

They were practicing on the combat training floor, in full protective gear; Nyder had also sprayed his hands with synthetic skin to protect them. They were fighting with long staffs, and Nyder was showing Slai a little backwards strike that managed to ping his opponent in the knee every time he thrust forward - even if Nyder closed his eyes first.

"How do you manage that, Trainee?" said Slai finally, stepping back and pulling off his face mask to show the fight was over.

Nyder stepped back as well, and pulled off his own mask, letting the chilled air of the room hit his face. "It's the Combat Forms all the Elite are drilled in. You always have to match the Forms, so your knee is always in the same place at the same time. All very well and pretty - as long as you aren't fighting other Elite who see a counter for it."

Slai grinned fiercely. "Glad to see you're willing to consider having to fight the Elite."

"Traitors are everywhere," Nyder said flatly, repeating one of the phrases that Slai had drilled into him. His voice wasn't quite as flat when he asked, "Why haven't you ever ordered me to your bed, Commander?"

Slai paused, for a very long moment. He rolled the staff over the back of his hand in a circle, his eyes locked on Nyder's sincere face. "That's a rather personal question, Trainee," he finally said.

"I'm sorry, Commander." He swallowed, and said in a rush, "I'd just rather know about it up front rather than have you surprise me."

Slai narrowed his eyes, and looked Nyder up and down. "If I said I wasn't going to order you to bed, ever, and I would never surprise you that way - could we leave it at that?"

"Of course, Commander. I mean - you are the Commander."

"That's right…." Slai's voice trailed off. "And I pay a high price for it, believe me. A price that anyone who follows after me has to be willing to pay." He shrugged out of the heavy protective jacket. "Come with me, Trainee."

Nyder came along willingly. He took off his own gear and left it for cleaning, and went into the empty training room showers with Slai. It was when they were under adjoining showerheads that he realised why Slai had always gone to his own quarters to clean up, before.

Slai's body was that of a hero: shoulders wide, every limb rippling with muscles, his chest and stomach taut and hairy. There were only a few scars on him, but they were - distinctive.

"Machine pistol blast," said Slai, his hands indicating the torn flesh between his legs. "I stepped between Davros and an assassin, and I'd do it again, a thousand times. The doctors tried to fix me - but I found out that these parts have even a lower priority in medical training than fixing hands."

The two men looked at each other, each with pain in their eyes.

Slai went on, "I was lucky my pelvis and spine weren't involved. Now Doctor Cennell makes synthetic hormones for me, and I inject myself. It keeps me big," he said, striking his chest with one fist with a sound like a war-drum. "And I have to be big, to be Security Commander." He turned and put his face into the hot water, letting it run over his shoulders and chest, feel it tickling in his ears.

When he took his face out of the water, Nyder was waiting with a soapy washcloth in one scarred hand - he didn't have to wear the gloves anymore in the showers. "May I wash your back?" he asked.

"Go ahead," said Slai, turning. He allowed himself to relax as the smaller man reached up and scrubbed at the top of his shoulders, then started working his way down his back. The soap suds trickled in long streams, following the muscles of his back, streaming down his legs.

"You're so big," said Nyder from behind him, scrubbing industriously and feeling the solid muscle under his hands. "I look at you and see a stone wall, or a tank, or a field cannon…"

Slai stretched his arms out to his side, letting Nyder scrub at him. He looked left and right, at the great heavy lines of muscle wrapped around the bones of him. He flexed his arms and heard Nyder make a noise of admiration.

Slai flexed all over, and held it, and thought of the hard hours he spent every day in the exercise room, testing and stretching every muscle, pushing himself just a little bit further every time. Getting bigger, getting stronger. For a reason.

"I am a wall," he said. "The wall between Davros and his enemies. I have to be. I have to be the biggest and the strongest. I've got to protect him, just as you have to, Nyder. He's the only hope our people have."

For a long time Nyder touched and admired Slai under the hot water. It wasn't sex, it wasn't even arousal, but it was all he could give.

* * *

Nyder found himself working in Davros' presence more and more often. There was some escalation of Davros' projects in the making, and he was reviewing all of the security procedures as a part of this. More and more stringent loyalty tests were being run on the Elite staff, and the results triple-analysed. Slai and Davros would meet to discuss those results, and Nyder would be there at Slai's elbow, watching and listening and learning.

Sometimes, Davros would call Nyder to his office alone, and quiz him on what he had learned from his training. The questions would come bullet-fast, and Nyder would stand there, at attention with his hands behind his back, only his lips moving as he answered the questions as fast as Davros shot them at him. This was a combination of pleasure and torture for him: excitement at the Supreme Commander's attention, and terror at the fear of making a mistake.

During one of these questioning sessions, the topic of supply renewal procedure came up, and in his haste Nyder used the wrong word. Instead of saying 'a thousand', he said 'ten-hundred'.

"Stop!" ordered Davros, and his voice became a cold metal purr. "I am not interested in Standard mathematical slang, Trainee. When you are working for me, you will use the exact and precise term, the correct term, for everything. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Davros," Nyder said, struggling to keep his face calm. He was certain the back of his neck was flushing: even when his face didn't turn red, his neck would betray him.

"'Ten-hundred', indeed." Davros backed his chair away a fraction, as though avoiding something unclean. "I'm surprised that this sort of nonsense is being taught, even at the Standard level."

Nyder writhed inside, but gave the honest answer. "They didn't teach me that, Davros."

"Explain."

"They never taught me to count past a hundred. They taught up to that, then explained two hundred and three hundred, and said it went on from there. I," Nyder swallowed, "I made up the word ten-hundred for myself. Davros."

The silence in the room pressed on Nyder's ears like a concussion blast. That silence was broken by the sound of Davros' chair moving closer to him, closer than he had been at first. Close enough that Nyder actually had to look down a little bit, to keep his eyes on the Supreme Commander's face.

"They never taught you…any math at all, involving numbers greater than hundreds?"

"No, Davros."

Davros was still. "Dismissed," he finally snapped, and Nyder smartly saluted and stepped briskly out of the room. Outside, his face and his walk were calm and smooth, but for a few moments his chest heaved as he drew in deep, panicked breaths of air. Then he relaxed. He was all right.

In his office, Davros was very still, thinking. He had realised that there were great and necessary gaps between Elite and Standard education; there was no point in wasting information on soldiers who would not live long enough to make any use of it. But not to teach any numbers above the hundreds! Trainee Nyder had already shown a definite aptitude for math; it was a part of that upward-sweeping learning curve that defied Davros' most optimistic predictions. For a man, for a child, to not have the concepts and axioms of math explained to him, to have to make up his own words in order to think about math; it would be like performing a scientific experiment with - with only one hand. Or none.

He thought about this for some time.

* * *

There was a meeting scheduled in the Kaled Dome, important enough that Davros was to attend in person. Certain of the Dome Councilmen wanted to confer with the Supreme Commander about his new projects. Slai would in attendance as well, as the senior Security officer, and Nyder was to accompany them. For the first time, he would stand before his people's leaders as one of the Elite, in their uniform. Nyder was cringingly certain that they would see right through him. That they would detect his Standard origins; pull him out of line, cut him down…

Slai deliberately ignored Nyder's endless picking at his immaculate uniform with his black-gloved hands. Finally though, he touched Nyder's arm and said in a low voice, "You'll wear yourself out with all that twitching. Calm down!"

Nyder forced himself to stop fidgeting, but he was still hyper-alert. He and Slai had examined the empty Dome conference room, floor and walls and ceiling and furniture, with eyes and with equipment. Others of the Security Elite had screened the six Councilmen who would attend the meeting.

Now they were to escort Davros inside. They walked side by side down the Dome corridor; Davros' chair moved behind them, surrounded by more guards. Slai opened the door to the conference room, and through the widening gap Nyder saw a long table, and a cluster of five men at the far end who looked up.

Five.

Without thinking, reacting purely out of instinct, Nyder turned and kicked. Kicked with both feet, lifting himself almost parallel to the ground in a single convulsive motion. His boot heels struck Davros' chair dead centre. It was a heavy chair, but the kick sent it hurtling backwards down the corridor, between the guards. Nyder's legs were just at full extension, and he had not had time to fall to the ground, when the bomb went off.

Slai had reacted as well, to his subordinate's actions and to the sudden sense of danger, by lunging to put himself directly between Davros and the doorway.

The Security Commander's great size served him well, one last time. Like a bullet in a gun barrel, his body absorbed the blow of the explosion, which hurtled him and Nyder into Davros and down the corridor. The blast stripped flesh from bone, ripped ligaments and shattered organs - but the bulk of two bodies was between Davros and the worst of it.

The last thought in both Nyder and Slai's minds was the same, the certain belief that they had saved Davros, a wordless shout of exultation that meant Victory!

And then darkness.  



	7. Ghost

Nyder woke up and he couldn't open his eyes.

He felt like his body was a nail: a nail that had been driven into a board by a very large, very rough hammer. His neck was solid agony, his shoulders and chest and spine hurt, and there was a hideous ache digging into each side of his head from his ears. But the most frightening thing was the lack of sensation he felt, or rather did not feel. He couldn't feel his eyes or the top of his head; he tried wiggling his eyebrows, and had no idea if anything moved.

Was he dead? He remembered the blast, feeling the great blow coming down on the top of his head and his shoulders. Was Slai dead? And -

"Davros?" he said aloud - or thought he did.

There was a confused noise in his ears, like words being spoken underwater, and then the touch of something against his cheekbone, something flat and wet.

A voice came into his head, oddly blurred and distorted; it didn't seem to come from any one place, but from all around him. "If you can hear me, raise your left hand twice."

Nyder tried, and it felt like lifting his arm against some tremendous weight. But slowly, he raised his left hand off whatever he was lying on, bobbed it twice, and then dropped it. He clutched at the soft material under him; a blanket. Was he in bed? Was he in hospital?

"Davros is safe?" he asked again, softer; there was a raw bloody taste in his throat that promised to grow worse if he spoke too much.

"I am uninjured," said the voice, and Nyder whimpered. Almost by reflex, he tried to raise his hand to salute, but stopped before he got halfway there; the pain was just too great.

"I am speaking to you with a bone conduction microphone," said Davros, in that half-familiar blurred voice. "That is the object you feel on your face. Your ears have been bandaged to help them recover from the acoustic trauma. You have a dislocated shoulder, two slipped spinal disklets, a badly lacerated scalp or rather remains of a scalp, shrapnel wounds to your upper torso, numerous contusions and two sprained ankles. And your vision…your eyes, have been permanently damaged."

Nyder swallowed, and finally whispered, "Slai?"

"Dead."

"But - you are uninjured, Davros?"

"Only my pride is bruised. I underestimated the price my enemies were willing to pay in order to strike at me. None of the traitor Councilmen survived; I will make certain that their replacements are more sympathetic to my long-term projects."

Nyder tried to squeeze his eyes closed, to feel if there was anything there, but he couldn't. Not that it mattered, anyway.

Permanent eye damage. A Level One injury. After everything he'd endured, after all the suffering of the culling ward and his surgeries, after all his Elite training, he was going to die anyway. And this time the taste of death was even bitterer in his mouth, because he had really believed he had a chance. The disaster had come when he was fed and healthy, not dazed with exhaustion and hunger and fear.

Nyder sobbed, dryly. Once. Then he caught hold of himself, and said weakly. "May I - I beg to make a request, Davros."

"I am listening," echoed the voice from all around him.

"I - my last request. I would be most grateful if I c-c-c," he stuttered, then found his voice again. "If I could be c-culled, here. Please don't send me back to the culling ward - alive."

There was some sort of confusion; he vaguely sensed motion around him, and heard a garbled noise, as though someone else was speaking and Nyder was only hearing a few bits of the words.

He forced himself to go on. "And if that's against, against regulations, if someone could just bring me my service dagger." He had lain with that dagger at his hip in the culling ward, unable to draw it. But now he could open and close his hands, so - "Just leave it here, within reach, and I will take care of - me."

Instead of answering his request, Davros asked a new question. "Why did you kick my chair?"

Nyder swallowed; but then realised that this would probably be his last chance to tell a useful fact to Davros. "I saw something in the Councilmen's faces, something wrong, and I knew what was going to happen. And - when you're thinking, Davros, and sometimes when you're startled, you - you clamp your chair to the floor, I don't know how, I don't know how it works. But you lock yourself down. And if I'd shouted the warning, if I'd startled you and you'd done that, you would have died."

There was a long silence around Nyder, then more half-heard words. Nyder got the impression that Davros was talking, but not to him. Then there was a sudden touch on his skin. Something wet circling on the back of his left hand, coating it with wetness.

Disinfectant, of course. He knew that sensation: it was someone disinfecting his skin, wiping the liquid round with a sponge. They must have a poison injector here, and were preparing him for the needle. How ridiculous, to disinfect the skin of a man about to be culled. Regulations, he thought, and the corners of his mouth turned up for a moment in what was probably going to be his last smile.

The wiping continued, and then there was the sensation of more motion near him; the bed moved a little, and he shivered at the pains that tiny shifting woke in him. All going away now, all the world. His last feeling in the world, it seemed, would be pain.

There was a pressure on his wet left hand. He expected a pinprick sensation, but this was something flat and cold, but not perfectly flat. It seemed to have ridges on it.

It moved. It spread those ridges, feebly, and grasped at Nyder's hand with - fingers.

It was Davros. Davros, touching him with his single hand. The old withered hand shook atop his, and he shook as well, all over, at the terrifying implications. Why would Davros touch him, Davros never touched anyone-

Davros' voice was thunder rolling through his head. "I fear I must deny your last request. I am in need of a new Security Commander. And you are the one I have chosen to take that role."

"I can't." Nyder said that quickly, and then tried to - take it back? No, he couldn't do that. He wasn't fit to serve, not in his condition. He was unable to give Davros the protection he needed. "Davros, I'm injured, Level One injury-"

"Doctor Cennell says that your eye injuries will be correctable, either with surgery or minor prosthetics. And that your other injuries will heal as well. I am not planning on going anywhere, not after this assassination attempt. I will stay in the Bunker, and wait for your recovery."

The hand pressed down on his. "Nyder. I have faith in you. Do not fail me." And then the cold shivering weight of Davros' hand was withdrawn.

It did not matter. That hand might as well have been pressed directly to Nyder's heart, so great was the effect on him. The cold of that touch had fired Nyder, filled him with new life as it were. Cold life, to be certain, but he tried to keep his voice steady as he said, "I will not fail you, Davros."

* * *

He lay in bed and he healed. His ears recovered quickly, and Cennell was often there to talk to him, reassure him, let him know how the surgeries were going. He had gained more wounds in those seconds in the Dome corridor than he had in all his previous military training and career. Nyder wondered how much of the shrapnel being picked out of him was bits of table and bomb casing, and how much was bits of Slai, and then put the thought aside.

His eyes were responding well to treatment, although his night vision would probably never recover. They managed to save some of his scalp, and patch the rest together with skin grafts; Davros was unhappy with the prospect of a piebald second in command, however, and ordered that a solution be found.

They resurrected an antique machine from the depths of a Kaled warehouse, and set it to scanning his scalp and skull before it permanently implanted thousands of strands of artificial hair on his head. There would be some real hairs mixed in where follicles had survived: still, he wouldn't need to get his hair cut very often, and anyone who tried to set his head on fire wouldn't be able to get it to do more than smoulder.

Drugs could keep the pain of the implantation machine away, but could do nothing for the slow sluggish trickle of blood from the myriad tiny wounds. The blood soaked his hair, old and new. It soaked the bandages over his eyes, making them heavy and sticky, and Cennell kept bringing him more water, urging him to rehydrate himself.

When the machine was done, and his wounds and eyes had healed, he was done. Finished. They brought him the uniform of a Security Commander, antique glasses to correct his vision, and the work schedule, and he began.

* * *

He could use Slai's weapons, but none of the deceased Commander's clothes would fit. Nyder cleared them out of his new quarters, along with the extra-width bed, the pictures of old comrades, everything that had been Slai's. The great mirrors that lined the walls went into storage; Nyder had no desire to look at himself. He would have removed the mirror from over the sink in his new personal washroom if he was good enough at shaving, but he still nicked himself sometimes.

The only non-regulation item Nyder kept was a small picture on browned paper that had been carefully sealed in clear plastic. It was an uncoloured picture of a group of people, standing in front of a white wall. There was the remains of a caption on the torn bottom edge; 'Scientific Elite Coordi-' and 'Team has' were all he could read. But one of the people standing there was strange. He had very long hair, even for a civilian, which was caught in a tube-shaped clasp over one shoulder. There was something odd about the shape of his body - no.

This had to be a woman. A her, not a him. A woman, and she was wearing the same white laboratory uniform as the men in the picture. The idea of a woman in the Scientific Elite was too much of a mystery for Nyder to abandon, so he put the picture back where he had found it, hidden in the back of the desk.

When he was done the quarters were bare of anything but a standard bunk, locker and desk. On the desk, one last reminder of his time in the Wastelands: his service dagger, the hilt worn bare, the pommel notched. That was all he needed.

* * *

The task of filling the giant Slai-sized hole in the hierarchy with himself gave Nyder less trouble than he had thought. He supposed that most of it had to do with his close working relationship with Slai; for the rest, he tried to fill the space he now occupied with cold menace.

The extremely high mortality rate among Security Commanders probably helped as well. The men probably thought they would not have to put up with him for too long.

He was certain that the Security Elite would subtly chafe under his discipline, and they did. They had a way of looking down their noses at him, and hesitating before obeying his orders. He decided to call a group training exercise. Once the guards were lined up in the training room, in full protective gear, he had two of the Laboratory Assistants haul in a standard metal desk, heavy and solid.

There were several elbow nudges in his audience, and he picked up the words 'desk warrior'. His own eyes narrowed in chill satisfaction, but no one could see through the padded bars of the helmet he wore.

"We are going to have a discussion of combat terrain in the Bunker," Nyder said, in that smooth cold voice that he had carefully cultivated. "Private Coun, step forward."

Coun stepped forward, standing beside the desk in the middle of the room, and in an instant he was sitting on the floor, staring wide-eyed at his left forearm which now curved oddly. A wet patch spread on his padded sleeve. Nyder had seized his arm and broken it over the edge of the desk, as calmly as he would sign a memo. And he had done it so fast, with so little warning, that Coun hadn't even had time to tense his muscles, much less counter-attack.

Coun didn't scream, but he gave a little shout when Nyder tapped him with the side of his foot, not gently. "Dismissed to the medical bay. Now, we are going to practice manoeuvring around and over this desk, because in real combat we do not line up in neat rows on a bare empty floor and do Forms until they are all just right. This is the Bunker, this is the terrain that you are defending and which you will fight in." His eyes froze the men in place, except for Coun, walking carefully out the door and supporting his broken arm so as not to jostle it. "Real combat is messy, hard and graceless, and you will use your skills and the terrain, together, to save your neck and break your opponent's. In roster order, forward and over!" And as each man jumped or rolled over the desk, Nyder did his best to impede them - and his best was very, very good.

When the lesson was done, four men were on their way to the medical bay, and every man bore bruises. Including Nyder: his hands were a mass of blood-blisters under his gloves, but nobody could see. Nyder thought that four men disabled was about right to make his authority clear. He pulled the reserve men onto the schedule, and made a note to himself not to disable more than one of them at a time.

He showed the Security Elite every hand-to-hand combat trick he'd painfully learned on the battlefield. He trained them mercilessly, criticised them endlessly: they were never good enough for him. They strove endlessly to improve themselves, and he kept setting the bar higher. Kept them running, so they'd never notice that he was running just as fast, scrabbling to stay ahead, to become one of the Elite.

Security Commander Slai had been a wall: Security Commander Nyder would be a stiletto, silent and lethal in the dark, moving too quickly to be seen, using speed rather than size as his defence.

* * *

Once his authority was established, Nyder made occasional use of the men under him for sex, in a fairly normal fashion. He wasn't obsessed with gymnastics and endurance; most of the time he preferred his own hand. He took no lovers, only temporary bed-warmers, and he never spoke as they serviced him. He emptied himself into them and sent them back to duty. Sometimes at the peak he thought of a gun that never ran out of bullets; sometimes he thought of a cold hand on his.

* * *

They issued him a medal for his role in saving Davros; Nyder stood at attention as some military functionary draped it around his neck on its ribbon. He didn't care about the honour that the medal represented; his honour was that Davros was there, personally, watching as he saluted and the recorded sound of cheering was played.

Afterwards, Davros told him that he had reset the motor controls of his chair, to prevent the clamping-down habit that could have cost him his life. That was a greater honour still. That was what he remembered when he wore that medal.

* * *

Davros watched the development of his new Security Commander with something approaching intense interest. It was gratifying to see the man change himself to conform to his new role's requirements. And it was galling that Davros could not consult his own notes on the Spire Project subjects: the notes were currently in his safe, and he could not access it without help. Under the circumstances it might be unwise to ask Nyder, and there was nobody else in the Bunker he could trust to move or destroy those papers.

He could, however, access the computer. He discontinued the Spire Project alerts, and discovered that the alerts were not going to be necessary anyway. Subjects Eisel, Lett, and Marb were MIA; Subjects Borr and Nettek were deceased; and Subject Nyder was under his control. So he could put the Spire Project aside. Forget its subjects; forget that it had ever existed. And enjoy the sole result, a man with Standard obedience and Elite intelligence. Nyder.

* * *

There was one thing that Security Commander Nyder had the authority to do, that Security Trainee Nyder had not: look up personnel records. He sat in front of his terminal for a long time, before his fingers typed in the command to pull Erem's record. The wait while the computer called up the file seemed endless; and his heart froze when he saw the last entry was nearly eight months ago. Every personnel record should be updated at least once a month.

He read:

// F!FTS - A Bt - D //  
FAILED FITNESS TO SERVE - ASSIGNED BATTLEFIELD DUTY - DECEASED.

Nyder looked at those words for a long time, and felt as though a part of him had died with them. Or rather, felt a certain confirmation that a dead part of him was truly dead.

Erem was gone.

* * *

He waited a day, three days, before he looked up another record.

Nenno.

It had not been updated in three years. // D // DECEASED.

White rage leaped up in Nyder's heart, rage and crushing disappointment; but he didn't show it in his face or body. The tortures that he had fantasised for that boy-hunting monster if he ever had the power: and now he had the power, and Nenno had escaped him. All those fascinating machines down in the Interrogation Centre that he'd been planning to use on him, and the man had the gall to just die!

He breathed in, then out, slowly, with control. That's what you get for caring about revenge, he told himself silently. Better to never care. About anything, except duty.

Then he thought of something, and his hands returned to the keyboard. This was going to be a more difficult search: he needed to pull the list of names of men in a certain role at a certain time, and look at their faces. He didn't know the name he was looking for.

* * *

The Dome guard had no idea why he had been arrested. Or stripped of weapons and clothes and fastened down in the Bunker Interrogation Centre. The Security men who brought him here didn't say anything to him; they just double-checked the restraints and left. He frantically reviewed his personal history, and found more than enough errors, mistakes, complicity in certain things - but he didn't know anything he'd done that would be worth bringing him to the Elite Bunker!

He did not think in terms of illegality, or innocence. That was not the way things worked in Kaled society. The Elite were a law unto themselves: they punished and rewarded according to rules that nobody else understood or could hope to follow.

The Security Elite man who entered next was as sleek as some deadly black-chromed weapon. He circled the helpless guard, staring at him. He was wearing glasses, and the eyes behind the lenses burned like red-hot knives being drawn over bare flesh.

He spoke - and the guard thought he felt his heart die in his chest. He would come to wish, in the minutes and hours and days to follow, that it had died. But instead he would live out those minutes and hours and days, and regret living every single one of them.

In a good imitation of the guard's own voice, as though quoting him, the man said, "'Here's one, Administrator Nenno'."

* * *

Davros almost never left the Bunker now. Nyder visited the Dome for him, delivering orders and confiscating supplies, with armed Security escorts always at his back. On one of those trips, he vaguely noticed a man duck away as he passed: if he had stopped and looked closer, he would have got quite a surprise. Because the man was someone he thought dead.

But Nenno was alive, and he intended to stay that way. He was a paranoid man who loved his pleasures, and he had blackmailed a Computer Systems Coordinator into duplicating and editing his record. Three years ago, Nenno was marked deceased. The new record, (space)Nenno(space) gave him private quarters and an unlimited ration card and access to the boys' barracks: that was all he desired. And thanks to those spaces in the copied record, he was hidden from any computer search.

But he remembered that filthy little boy Nyder, who had somehow survived the Wastelands to become Security Commander Nyder. And surely, Nyder would remember him.

Now Nenno hid in a darkened room, and shivered, his fingers nervously moving up and down the edge of his tunic. He would have to be more careful. One sight of his face, and everything would be over for him. Three years ago he had cut off contact with his previous allies, changed his clothes and his haircut. Now he had to be more thorough. He knew a doctor who did reconstructive work on battlefield casualties, and also knew his addiction to a certain drug. Perhaps it was time for Nenno to change his own face. And reward the doctor with a poisoned batch of his drug, for the sake of silence.

* * *

Nyder was a much better spy than Slai had ever been; being small did have its advantages. While searching Scientist Parran's quarters he found a pair of metal dice: gambling was forbidden of course, and Nyder was pleased to bring the information to his Commander. Davros said that Parran was worth keeping alive, so Nyder had him flogged, and then flayed the bottom of one of his feet to bare muscle. He made it clear that he'd flay the other foot and both hands next if Parran did not turn in all his co-gamblers for punishment. He did, and was permitted to stay in the Bunker; he just limped for a few weeks.

Nyder dimly remembered that there was a time when torturing someone who had not personally hurt him would have been unthinkable to him. This was not that time.

Some of the things he uncovered were more serious. There were Elite scientists who actually disapproved of Davros' work, who could not see the brilliant vision of their leader for what it was: the only way for their species to survive. Nyder reported his misgivings to Davros, and kept track of those men who could not be trusted.

* * *

"I'm telling you, Davros wants you to fail!" the man hissed, hidden in the shadows of the lower level. "What did you do, Quol?"

Nyder heard that hiss, and his lips moved in what was not quite a smile. He'd been tracking certain irregularities in the flow of men to and from this area, and now he had found them. And he recognised the speaker's voice. Doctor Cennell. He made not the slightest noise; he stood still and listened.

He recognised the voice that replied as well: Quol was one of the Senior Researchers. "I didn't do anything, except look in the archives for a certain paper that ought to be there: the one that Davros' current research is based on. When I couldn't find it, I put in an inquiry, thinking it had been withdrawn. Has - has he ordered you to fail me in the Fitness to Serve test?"

"Your annual exam is next week." Cennell sounded terribly sad. "He has asked that the physical tests be made as exacting as possible. He didn't say outright that I fail you, but he implied it."

"You're not how he's going to fail me, Cennell. It will be the intelligence test, on something obscure, something non-standard. Something he's sure I won't know about. And I'll fail. That means transfer to the Dome, to one of the lesser military laboratories."

"Or a bullet." Cennell sighed, deeply enough that even the hidden listener could hear. "Prem's axioms."

"What?"

"They're what Davros is going to give the extra test on; I heard him discuss it with that Standard he's got as our new Security Commander."

Nyder narrowed his eyes. Deceit on a Fitness to Serve test, or helping other to deceive it, carried specific penalties.

There was a new tone in Quol's voice: hope. "Prem's axioms, of course. Something we haven't thought of since our first lessons, but that we are supposed to know by heart." Quol chuckled, and Cennell hissed for silence. Then Quol went on, more quietly, "You may have just saved my life."

"I hope it wouldn't have gone that far. But what's to prevent Davros from claiming that you failed anyway?"

"Even Davros wouldn't do that, not if I truly pass. He can't. If I pass all the tests, all of them, and keep my head down, I have a chance." A slap, as of a hand on a clothed arm. "You're a good man, Cennell."

"The Bunker needs you, no matter what Davros thinks." A muffled laugh. "Just - be careful, please."

As the two men departed, Nyder watched from the shadows. They entered the lift together: Quol was looking at Cennell with gratitude as the doors closed behind them.

* * *

When Nyder needed to think at length without input from others, he did so in his shower. He took a lot of showers, now that he had his own washroom and an unlimited water ration. Two and sometimes three showers a day. A stiletto can never be too clean or too sharp.

He stood in the hot downpour, feeling his tense muscles relax, and the uneven napping effect as his artificial hair shed water. The sound of the water blotted out all other noise and let him concentrate.

Cennell and Quol were breaking regulations, absolutely. Conspiring to cheat at the Fitness to Serve tests, the standards by which all Kaleds were judged fit to live - or not.

But according to their words, Davros was also misusing the tests. Those tests were the foundation of Kaled civilisation, as much as the infant testing that marked children as Standard or Elite. It was wrong, deeply and obscenely wrong to think about biasing them in any fashion.

If Nyder remained silent about the researcher's foreknowledge, Quol would refresh his knowledge of Prem's axioms, and he would pass the test. Davros could always find another way, a regulation way, to dismiss him. But Quol was not the person he was thinking of.

He closed his eyes, feeling the hot water drum on his eyelids.

Cennell had worked hard on Nyder, rebuilding his hands step by step, finger by finger. He held those hands in front of him, and then rubbed them on his arms, feeling the long scars, the bent knuckles, the skin crinkled by water and by grafts. He could not see his hands; he always showered in the dark.

He suddenly realised why Davros of all people would be so forgiving of a Security Trainee who had taken Level One injuries. Davros, after all, had sustained far worse and been permitted to survive. Nyder cupped his face in his hands and imagined it like Davros': paralysed, eye sockets empty. Burnt hairless, scarred and mutilated.

Cennell was far too young to be one of the doctors who had helped heal Davros. But he had given Nyder back his hands and his sight. Paid attention to him, above and beyond what duty called for.

Cennell had been kind.

Nyder rubbed his hands over his face, and then over each other, deciding.

* * *

Cennell was very nervous when he was called to Davros' office; he was terrified when he arrived and found Davros there, with the new Security Commander standing at his left side - and Quol in front of them both.

"Davros," said Cennell, going to stand beside Quol.

"Doctor Cennell." Davros' mechanical voice was as smooth as it ever got. "I have just been reviewing a report from a civilian scientist, Kavell. He has done some groundbreaking work on the treatment of genetic disease, specifically Vos' Syndrome. He has a series of treatments which should prevent it from manifesting in people who carry the Vos' Syndrome gene."

Davros turned his chair a fraction. "I have reviewed my staff and find that you, Quol, carry the genes for Vos' Syndrome. I thought that as a favour to Kavell - who is truly a gifted scientist, he should be assessed for assignment to the Bunker - I could send yourself, and Cennell, along with a copy of your medical records to see if his treatment would be applicable to you."

Cennell was forcing himself to relax; apparently this had nothing to do with Quol's upcoming testing. And if Davros was suspicious of either of them, he would never arrange for them to leave the Bunker together.

"I have already contacted Kavell; he is waiting to see you both, in the Dome. Commander Nyder will escort you."

"Thank you, Davros," Quol said, and Cennell echoed him.

The three men left Davros' office; he remained, his sole hand tapping at the console of his chair. He had already given Nyder his orders.

* * *

There was a tiny rail line running from the Bunker to the Dome, for the fast transfer of troops and supplies. There were three people in the open car moving down that rail now; Cennell and Quol sitting in one seat, side by side, and Nyder in the seat behind them, his calm eyes looking at the backs of their heads. The narrow tunnel was dark, and the only noise was the echoes of the metal wheels clicking on the metal rails.

The darkness was broken: ahead was light, artificial light reflecting off a small white-tiled platform, marking the entrance to the Dome proper. As the train slowed to a halt, Nyder carried out Davros' orders.

Cennell died first, died before he realised what was going to happen to him or to his patient. In a way, that was almost a kindness. And then Quol, an instant later. Nyder put the small handgun away, and reminded himself to clean it when he got back to the Bunker. Then he sat and waited for the rest of Davros' orders to be carried out.

After the sounds of the two shots stopped echoing against the tiles, the Dome cleaning crew emerged, with hooked poles to remove the bodies and drag them up onto the platform, and a cart of cleaning supplies. They worked with practiced efficiency together: they had recovered the bodies of the dead before, many times. Nyder did not move as they scraped the blood and brains from the front of the car, and cleaned the great wet spray off the rail bed, recovering every scrap of organic matter for recycling. He just watched, blank-faced as a corpse himself. The crew worked quickly, to be done and out from under that gaze.

When they were finished, Nyder pushed a foot pedal to reverse the train's direction; he did not bother to turn around in his seat. He watched the dark rails flow away from him as he moved backwards through the tunnel, back to the Bunker. He moved through the darkness, silent.

He had obeyed Davros' orders.

He would live.

Live, he would live. There was something else that went with that, but he blotted it out, didn't think about it. He would live. He would obey. That was enough.

**THE END**

 

 

**NOTES ON THE TALE:**

First and foremost, many thanks to LilacFree for her generous beta-reading of this story.

Events in this story are AU and do not synchronise with the "I, Davros" audio CD series. However, people who have listened to that series, or to the stand-alone "Davros" CD, will quickly guess the identity of the young woman in the photograph that Nyder finds.  
The name Slai reminds me of Slay and Liar and Sly, and also of Elisabeth Sladen.  
The numbers which young Nyder calls 'special' are prime numbers.  
Tasty Treats for your (something) Polla! - A polla is a small ground mammal, which mutated during the War to have a poisonous bite. Nyder of course has no concept of the word 'pet', and is unable to read that word on the food packaging. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The planet Skaro is the home world of the Daleks, featured in many classic episodes of Doctor Who. The character Nyder appears in the 4th Doctor story 'Genesis of the Daleks' working with the Daleks' creator, Davros. Events in this story are AU and do not synchronise with the "I, Davros" audio CD series.


End file.
